Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

The Topics Teachers are too Afraid to Teach

Samantha LaFrance, PEN America

Frederick Douglass, women’s suffrage, jazz and the blues, Batman, reproductive biology, philosophy. In states with restrictive educational policies, teachers and professors have questioned if they are allowed to teach each of these topics. Since 2021, 40 educational gag orders–state legislative and policy efforts to restrict teaching about topics such as race, gender, American history, and LGBTQ+ identities–have been enacted via law or policy. These bills are behind widely publicized firings, book bans, and curricular controversies across the nation, and through a series of surveys and reports, we are finally beginning to understand the toll they have taken on educators. The most notable of these surveys are two major studies by researchers at the RAND Corporation, which surveyed 8,000 K–12 educators. Other studies have been compiled by education researchers at UC San Diego and the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access, from the National Association for Music Education, and the American Association of University Professors.

Hegemonic Wellness: A Post-Covid Assault on Teachers and Teaching

Roger Saul, Radical Teacher

Most  years,  I  teach  a  graduate  seminar  called Dismantling Educational Discourses. My students at the  University  of  New  Brunswick –a  midsize university on Canada’s East Coast –are schoolteachers and administrators  working    toward    Master’s    degrees    in Education, and our course prompts them to question what passes  for  truth  and  knowledge  in  schools.  We  think together  about  how  and  why  schools  elevate  particular curricula, codes of conduct, relationships, and presentations of   self.   And   we   try   to   elevate   notions   like   critical consciousness   and   emancipation   from   oppression   in considering the work of teaching and learning. In past years, we’ve read and discussed works by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, Marie Battiste, and Henry Giroux, among others.

‘My mission’: Dolores Huerta Elementary Principal Estela Lopez extends support to community

Mallika Seshadri, EdSource

When Estela Lopez was about 7 years old, her brother told her she could join in on an adventure — provided she stayed strong, followed instructions and didn’t cry. After school one day, Lopez and her older brother trekked across the street to their local school in what used to be South Central Los Angeles and climbed over the walls, jumping from one room to the next despite hearing their mother calling their names. By chance, Lopez stumbled on a recycling bin packed with paper worksheets. She grew excited and rummaged for more.

Language, Culture, and Power

As Chicago’s shelter rule for migrant families takes effect, here are three student rights to know

Reema Amin, Chalkbeat Chicago

Chicago educators and advocates are concerned about how Mayor Brandon Johnson’s new 60-day limit for shelter stays for migrant families will impact attendance and stability for migrant students. The new rule comes as the city has struggled to house migrants. More than 22,000 have arrived from the Southern border since August 2022, many fleeing economic and political upheaval in Central and South American countries. City and state officials have promised to boost efforts to help families get resettled and find more permanent housing, a commitment that comes just as a state-operated rental assistance program will no longer apply to newly arrived immigrants who are entering shelters, Block Club Chicago reported.

Dear Educators, a Balm for Deep Cuts: Navigating Racial Microaggressions at School

Diana Lee, EdSurge

I remember the first and only time I’ve ever yelled at a teacher in class. Growing up in the U.S. as a female child of immigrants from Taiwan, this kind of behavior is practically sacrilegious; certainly scandalous and wildly antithetical to my traditional upbringing. I was raised above all else to not only revere education, but to literally show respect to educators and elders by being a dutiful, quiet, listening and obedient learner. This meant I was consistently rewarded at school for putting my head down and striving to be a “good student” and “high achiever,” but never for challenging authority or speaking up when something was wrong.

Surviving a Wretched State [Video]

Melvin Rogers and Neil Roberts, Boston Review

I wanted to begin by thinking about different ways of discussing modern Black political thought and then trying to situate what I take your book to be doing. There are different ways of thinking about not only African American political thought, but also what we might call Africana thought, a modern mode of thinking that began on October 12, 1492. Sylvia Wynter, Enrique Dussel, and others define the Atlantic slave trade as the moment when people began to self-identify with or get ascribed the labels “African” or “of African descent.” When thinking about Africana thought in the modern period, there seem to be three key questions. The first question, we might call the identity question, the third, the freedom question, and the second, mediating those two, the equality question.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

The aftermath of Texas’s disappointing vote on science textbooks

National Center For Science Education

After the Texas state board of education’s vote on science textbooks approved for use in the state’s public schools at its November 17, 2023, meeting — which was, as NCSE previously reported, apparently influenced by the board’s misguided objections to evolution and climate change — there was a chorus of condemnation around the state and across the country. A columnist for the Houston Chronicle (November 17, 2023) complained that the board’s vote was mortifying, adding, “An embarrassment-free approval of science textbooks would have been nice, but the real tragedy will come when our kids open those censored textbooks. We owe them a better education and a brighter future.” “It’s certainly still possible for Texas’ students to get a sound scientific education in general and in regard to [evolution and climate change],” NCSE’s Deputy Director Glenn Branch told the Austin American-Statesman (November 21, 2023). “It’s just going to be despite of the Texas State Board of Education.”

I Quit Teaching to Become a Climate Activist. Here’s Why

Bryce Coon, Education Week

As I pack my suitcase for Dubai, in United Arab Emirates, to attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) this week, I am reflecting that a mere six months ago, I was wrapping up my 11th year of teaching high school social studies. Now, I am attending COP28 to advocate climate education in front of decisionmakers and leaders from around the world. It is an honor to represent my organization and other educators on this stage. But I am guided by the vivid and recent memories of my students as I head off—and their very real fears about the climate crisis. Have you recently talked to a teenager about climate change?

D.C. teens, now new authors, celebrate book launch

Lauren Lumpkin, Washington Post

The teen girls watched anxiously as an easel, cloaked in a black cloth, was pushed to the front of the stage. Behind it, the culmination of weeks of research, writing and editing. They had gathered in a room at Busboys & Poets on K Street NW, where guests snacked on chicken wings and fresh fruit. Joined by their fathers and grandmothers, cousins and mentors, the D.C. high-schoolers would finally see the covers of the books they had written and hold the pages in their hands.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Over 1,200 “Educators for Palestine” Sign Open Letter Demanding Ceasefire

Chris Walker, Truthout

Hundreds of academics from universities and institutions of higher learning (as well as public school K-12 teachers) from across North America have signed on to a joint letter, calling on their governments to demand an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza, where the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians since the start of October. As of Sunday evening, the document has more than 1,200 signatures, available to view here. The signers, calling themselves “Educators for Palestine,” are Palestinian academics and their allies who denounce Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as governments complicit in the genocide, including the United States. The letter calls for such governments to “stop funding the genocide and instead call for a ceasefire, an end to the blockade of humanitarian aid, and restoration of access to water, electricity, and medicine in Gaza.”

For Palestinian Students Shot in Vermont, a Collision of Two Worlds

Anna Betts and Jenna Russell, New York Times

In many ways, the three young men who were shot as they ambled down a sidewalk last Saturday in Burlington, Vt., were like any other longtime friends reuniting on a leisurely Thanksgiving weekend. What made them different may have also made them targets: Tahseen Ali Ahmad, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Hisham Awartani are Palestinian Americans, navigating between the peaceful privilege of college life in America and the dangerous instability of their conflict-ravaged homeland some 5,000 miles away. In an instant, one of the injured students said on Wednesday, those two worlds collapsed into one, shaking his sense of the United States as safer. In his first interview since the shooting, a day after he was discharged from the hospital, Mr. Abdalhamid said that he expects the attack to have a lasting impact — not only for him and his friends, but for every Palestinian.

How a prison education program is building community on the inside — and out [AUDIO]

Here & Now, WBUR

Northwestern University is celebrating the first graduates from its bachelor’s degree program for incarcerated students. The group persevered through the pandemic to complete their studies while building community on the inside. Here & Now’s Deepa Fernandes speaks with Jennifer Lackey, the founding director of the Northwestern Prison Education Program.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Race Is a Big Factor in School Closures. What You Need to Know

Evie Blad & Ileana Najarro, Education Week

As districts consider closures to cope with budgetary declines, new research adds to concerns that schools with higher enrollments of Black students are more likely than other schools to be shut down. “The big picture is that race plays a role in this process,” said Francis A. Pearman, an assistant professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. “And if we intend to be thoughtful, intentional, to do right by the communities we serve, it’s important to address that head on.”

Many rural California communities are desperate for school construction money. Will a new bond measure offer enough help?

Carolyn Jones, Cal Matters

As California’s fund to fix crumbling schools dwindles to nothing, lawmakers are negotiating behind the scenes to craft a ballot measure that would be the state’s largest school construction bond in decades. But some beleaguered school superintendents say the money will not be nearly enough to fix all the dry rot, leaky roofs and broken air conditioners in the state’s thousands of school buildings. And it won’t change a system that they say favors wealthy, urban, left-leaning areas that can easily pass local bond measures to make needed repairs.“The big question is, why can’t our kids have school buildings that are safe and as nice as other kids’ schools, just a few miles away?”

Sexism in academia is bad for science and a waste of public funding

Nicole Boivin, Susanne Täuber, Ulrike Beisiegel, Ursula Keller & Janet G. Hering, Nature Reviews Materials

Higher education and research institutions are critical to the well-being and success of societies, meaning their financial support is strongly in the public interest. At the same time, value-for-money principles demand that such investment delivers. Unfortunately, these principles are currently violated by one of the biggest sources of public funding inefficiency: sexism. Before she helped develop COVID-19 vaccines, going on to jointly win the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Katalin Karikó’s story was one that was familiar to many women: she faced lack of funding and recognition, demotion and was ultimately pushed out of her university. Although Karikó managed to overcome these extraordinary barriers, many more women respond to pervasive gender discrimination and harassment by departing academia. A huge study of a quarter of a million US academics adds to the growing weight of evidence for this gender-based attrition.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Tricky Marketing? How Schools Sell Themselves to Students

NEPC

As nations around the world embrace choice-based education models that seek to emulate the competitive environment of the business world, schools are increasingly facing pressure to market themselves to potential students. A wide-ranging literature review published earlier this year in the peer-refereed Review of Educational Research takes stock of this reality by examining how schools market themselves in different types of choice-based environments, and what the implications may be for issues of equity and academic quality. The article, titled Marketing and School Choice: A Systematic Literature Review, is authored by Ellen Greaves, Deborah Wilson, and Agnes Nairn. Described as the “first-ever systematic literature review of research into the effects of marketing by schools,” the article draws upon 81 English-language papers about studies set in more than a dozen different countries.

Diplomas for sale: $465, no classes required. Inside one of Louisiana’s unapproved schools

Sharon Lurye, AP News

Arliya Martin accepted her high school diploma with relief and gratitude. It was her ticket to better-paying work, she felt, after getting kicked out of high school and toiling for eight years at factory jobs to support her children. “This is a new path for me to get on with my life,” she said.

Arliya Martin, 26, right, talks to Kitty Sibley Morrison, principal and founder of Springfield Preparatory School, at school in Springfield, La., Thursday, July 27, 2023. Nearly 9,000 private schools in Louisiana don’t need state approval to grant degrees. Non-approved schools make up a small percentage of the state total. But the students in Louisiana’s off-the-grid school system are a rapidly growing example of the national fallout from COVID-19 — families disengaging from traditional education. But Martin didn’t take any classes or pass any tests to receive her degree. She got it in July from a school where students can get a high school diploma for $465.

How Black Moms in Temecula Are Fighting the School Board’s Right-Wing Takeover

Mara Marques Cavallaro, The Nation

Last December, in Temecula, Calif., a small city in a blue county known for its wineries and idyllic weather, three school board members voted to ban critical race theory on the day they were sworn into office. At their first meeting, on the stage of Temecula Valley High School’s auditorium, new board president Joseph Komrosky recited the Pledge of Allegiance; Jen Wiersma declared that “every skin color has both been a slave and owned a slave” as she decried Ethnic Studies’ “overemphasis on white supremacy”; and Danny Gonzalez saw nothing in the proposed policy—which effectively banned teaching about structural, quotidian, racism—that “undermine[d] the teaching of true American history.”

Other News of Note

As Chicago students work to improve their schools, they’re finding their voice along the way [Audio]

Sarah Karp, WBEZ

Inside a classroom at Juarez High School in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood this fall, students are serious as they craft a letter about the attitude and tone of some security guards, which they say creates a bad climate in the hallways. They are proposing a meeting with the head of security and the dean. The adviser has told them to approach it diplomatically. “First we just want to hear their side of the story,” says Kayla Romero, one of the students. “Maybe a kid’s doing something wrong in the hallways, and that’s causing them to be aggressive. So that’s why we will also want to see their perspective.” The students say they’ll use the information to come up with a plan with administrators to address the issue. Gruff security is a common complaint in high schools, and one many teens feel they have to live with. But these students are confident they can make a change.