Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Flag linked to Christian nationalism, Jan. 6 hung at Education Dept.

Zachary Schermele, USA Today

A top official at the U.S. Department of Education has been keeping a controversial flag linked to Christian nationalism and the Jan. 6 insurrection hung outside his office, according to the agency’s union and a department employee who has observed it. It’s the latest in a series of instances in which the flag – which depicts a pine tree and the words “An Appeal to Heaven” – has been associated with agencies and figures at the highest levels of the federal government. Though long tied to the American Revolution, the banner in more recent years “has been adopted primarily by evangelical Christian nationalist groups,” as well as the Proud Boys and certain neo-Nazi groups, according to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an independent nonprofit organization. It was flown in 2021 by rioters at the U.S. Capitol as they tried to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 presidential election results.

Faced with Trump’s deportation push, US teachers fear leaving the classroom

Mohammed Zain Shafi Khan, Aljazeera

For the past two years, weekdays for Susanna have meant thumbing through picture books, organising cubby holes and leading classroom choruses of songs. But her work as a pre-school teacher came to a screeching halt in October, when she found out her application to renew her work permit had been denied. Susanna, who uses a pseudonym in this article for fear of reprisals, is one of the nearly 10 percent of teachers in the United States who are immigrants. But while the US has increasingly looked abroad to fill teacher shortages, some foreign-born teachers say the deportation push under President Donald Trump has threatened their livelihoods — and risks traumatising their students.

Under Trump, protecting students’ civil rights looks very different

Sarah Butrymowicz, Hechinger Report

The 10-year-old was dragged down a school hallway by two school staffers. A camera captured him being forced into a small, empty room with a single paper-covered window. The staffers shut the door in his face. Alone, the boy curled into a ball on the floor. When school employees returned more than 10 minutes later, blood from his face smeared the floor. Maryland state lawmakers were shown this video in 2017 by Leslie Seid Margolis, a lawyer with the advocacy group Disability Rights Maryland. She’d spent 15 years advocating for a ban on the practice known as seclusion, in which children, typically those with disabilities, are involuntarily isolated and confined, often after emotional outbursts.

Language, Culture, and Power

A Teen’s Detention Diary and the Man Who Helped Share It With the World [Audio]

Adreanna Rodriguez and Maria Hinojosa, Latino USA

D. Esperanza is 14 years old. After traveling with his cousins from Honduras, he is held in the horrors of U.S. detention in Texas. For five months, while there, D. kept a journal of poems, drawings. It’s his memory of survival. Months later, Geraldo Iván Morales found the journal, about to be trashed. Now, D. and Gerardo are coauthors of “Detained,” a book based on D.’s journal. This is their story.

Assessing School Climate for Immigrant-Origin Students: Multistakeholder Insights in “Fearsome Times” 

Carola Suárez-Orozco, Milagros Calderon-Moya, Bailey Buchanan, Emma Lezberg, Marie Onaga, & Cinzia Pica, The Immigration Initiative at Harvard

The Immigration Initiative at Harvard is committed to advancing research and practice that supports the thriving of immigrant-origin students in U.S. schools. Decades of fieldwork and research have consistently unveiled both the promise and the peril embedded in the school climate experiences of these students. While some schools are sites of possibility and growth, too often newcomer and immigrant-origin youth encounter exclusion, bullying, and a lack of belonging within their learning environments. These negative experiences are not only widespread but also persist across varied school contexts and are well documented in research linking school climate to academic engagement, motivation, and well-being.

Why Do Darker People Suffer the Most? Examining the Past to Imagine Racial Justice in Education

Tyrone Howard, Educational Researcher

Examining the persistence of racial disparities in education, this presidential address provides a conceptual framework for advancing racial justice in education. Grounded in the tradition of “freedom dreams” and hope and belief in unseen possibilities, the talk addresses four principles: examining the foundations of racism and the complicity of higher education, identifying how racism shapes contemporary educational landscapes, evaluating organizational routines that perpetuate injustice in K–12 and higher education, and issuing a call to dismantle oppression and center racial justice in research and practice. Through interrogating histories, analyzing present evidence, and radically imagining transformative change, this work seeks a more just, humane, and equitable future for all students.

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Whole Children and Strong Communities

“A Planet Shaker”: Educational Impacts of USAID’s Dismantling

Rachel Silver, Francine Menashy, and Alyssa Morley, AERA OPEN

In early 2025, President Trump froze and then gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), slashing more than $50 billion of aid spending. The speed and scale of Trump’s cuts sent shockwaves around the world and destabilized a global order in which the United States wielded tremendous financial and symbolic power through its foreign aid. Although significant media attention has been paid to cuts’ devastating ramifications for global public health, little is known about the consequences of the funding cuts to international development education. In this article, we drew on 62 interviews with actors situated within both global and national organizations to consider how USAID closures have transformed education globally. Our findings indicate that development actors see in this moment both widespread damage to education sectors and the possibility for newly configured aid and educational relations.

When measles hit West Texas, school absences soared and it wasn’t just sick kids who were out

Makiya Seminera and Devi Shastri, AP News

When a measles outbreak hit West Texas this year, school absences surged to levels far beyond the number of children who likely became sick, according to a study, as students were excluded or kept home by their families to minimize the spread of the disease. Absences in Seminole Independent School District, a school system that served students at the heart of the outbreak, climbed 41% across all grade levels compared with the same period the two previous years, according to the Stanford University study. The preliminary study, which has not been published or finished a formal peer review, offers a glimpse at the toll on student learning from the spread of measles, a highly contagious disease that has crept up in communities around the U.S. with low vaccination rates. In Texas and nationally, about two-thirds of measles cases have been among unvaccinated children. When measles is spreading, public health officials respond by excluding unvaccinated students from schools.

Some countries recommend fewer childhood vaccines. That plan is riskier in America.

Barbara Rodriguez, The 19th

President Donald Trump is showing increasing interest in reducing the number of routine childhood vaccines in the United States. As part of that justification, he and anti-vaccine activists are pointing to what’s recommended in other countries — an idea that medical and public health experts say ignores key differences about the United States’ health care system. The topic was on display this month when speakers at a meeting held by a now-politicized vaccine advisory panel noted that countries like Denmark recommend fewer vaccines to children, including not recommending a universal birth dose for the hepatitis B vaccine. The panel ultimately agreed to end such a recommendation in the United States.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

In an Attempt to Cause Fear and Demobilize, the Trump Administration Increases Threats on Higher Education

Maximillian Alvarez, In These Times

International students are being abducted and disappeared by ICE in broad daylight. Life-saving research projects across the academy are being halted or thrown into disarray by seismic cuts to federal grants. Dozens of universities are under federal investigation for their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, their allowance of trans athletes to compete in college sports, and their tolerance of constitutionally protected Palestine solidarity protests. In today’s urgent episode of Working People, we get a harrowing, on-the-ground view of the Trump administration’s all-out assault on institutions of higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors, Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, and co-director of the Media, Inequality and Change Center; and Chenjerai Kumanyika, Assistant Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, AAUP Council Member, and Peabody-award winning host of Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD.

The Shakedown: Trump’s DOJ Pressured Lawyers to “Find” Evidence That UCLA Had Illegally Tolerated Antisemitism

Peter Elkind and Katherine Mangan, ProPublica

On the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed. Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at the University of California, Los Angeles, UC’s biggest campus. Milliken quickly packed up and made the five-hour drive to Denver to catch the next flight to California. He landed on the front lines of one of the most confounding cultural battles waged by the Trump administration.

Money Matters: How Social Class Shapes Students’ Understandings of Financing Their Education

Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley, Ashli Duncan-Buchanan, Eliza Epstein, Huriya Jabbar, &Lauren Schudde, EPAA

Higher education is increasingly expensive, and access disparities by race and social class exist. Yet, we lack nuance in the scholarly literature about students’ understandings of how hey finance their college education. We examine how class-based differences influence how students finance college education. We draw on concepts from economic sociology and sensemaking to examine how class backgrounds shape students’ meaning-making of finance and funding their college education. Through interviews with 56 community college students, we examine what money means to students and how that varies across classes, with implications for transfer decisions and outcomes. We surface important implications for students’ behaviors and decisions in college.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Tax the Rich or Burden Working Families? The Choice Is Clear.

Sylvelia Pittman, Inequality.org

I am a teacher on the West Side of Chicago. The Friday before Thanksgiving, my principal, myself, and a community partner at our school, BUILD inc, made sure that every student in our building went home with dinner. Let me be clear: We sent hundreds of children home from school with a meal because if we didn’t, they may not have had anything to eat. I teach at Nash Fine and Performing Arts Elementary in the Austin neighborhood, and I am a long-time educator in Chicago Public Schools. I have two grandchildren in CPS. I thought I had seen it all in my years, but as we sent our students home with meals that afternoon, I didn’t know whether to break down in tears or laugh at the absurdity of it all. In the city of Chicago, one of the world’s richest economies, teachers are the last line of defense against child hunger.

Jo Ann Allen Boyce Dies at 84; Braved Mobs in Integrating a School

Adam Nossiter, New York Times

Jo Ann Allen Boyce, one of the first Black students to desegregate a public high school in the South as part of the Clinton 12, died on Dec. 3 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 84. Her death, from pancreatic cancer, was confirmed by Adam Velk, the director of the Green McAdoo Cultural Center in Clinton, Tenn., a museum that commemorates the students’ stand. Ms. Boyce was a 14-year-old in Clinton, a small eastern-Tennessee city near Knoxville, when she and the others were thrust into the early stages of a struggle that was to rip apart the South for the next 15 years.

Her 1951 walkout helped end school segregation. Now her statue is in the U.S. Capitol

Rachel Treisman, NPR

In 1951, a Black teenager led a walkout of her segregated Virginia high school. On Tuesday, her statue replaced that of a Confederate general in the U.S. Capitol. Barbara Rose Johns was 16 when she mobilized hundreds of students to walk out of Farmville’s Robert Russa Moton High School to protest its overcrowded conditions and inferior facilities compared to those of the town’s white high school. That fight was taken up by the NAACP and eventually became one of the five cases that the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education, whose landmark 1954 ruling declared school segregation unconstitutional.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Amazon Has Been Conning School Districts out of Millions

Naomi Bethune, American Prospect

For over two decades now, Amazon has been seen as a one-stop shop to buy virtually anything, and get it delivered in no time flat. It’s been estimated that the platform has over 310 million active users, and just in the U.S. during 2023, sold over 4.5 billion items. Amazon claims to be guided by four principles: “customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking.” Certainly there is a very large quantity of retail items for sale on the platform, even if their quality or identity may be questionable. But in another much more obscure part of the business, Amazon’s supposed obsession with its customers and “commitment to operational excellence” falls flat.

The Hidden Dangers of Meta’s Partnership Offer to Schools

Faith Boninger, The Progressive

For more than a century, corporations have used school partnerships as a means to reach student and family consumers. As far back as the 1920s, schools were so inundated with gifts of branded calendars, charts, maps, posters, thermometers, and samples that the National Education Association commissioned a report to help teachers deal with “propaganda in the schools.” In the 1970s, my elementary school in New York State became a site for one of Scholastic’s popular school book fairs to encourage my classmates and me to buy piles of books published by the company. Thirty years later, a local Jamba Juice franchise partnered with my children’s middle school to sell its branded smoothies at their soccer games. 

A Progressive Case for a Student-Centered Education Agenda

Gary Jones, Texas Tribune

Across the country, voters are reacting to the second Trump era by electing Democrats at every level of government – state to federal to local. In Miami, voters just elected their first Democratic mayor in 30 years. Virginia voters flipped 13 House of Delegates seats and every statewide office. The energy is unmistakable, and with 2026 approaching, Texas could be next. Here at home, Capitol Inside recently wrote that the “Texas House Majority may be back in play” after national midterm trends. History backs that up: in 2018, during a similar “blue wave,” Democrats gained 12 Texas House seats. Today, Democrats are just 14 seats from the majority. So what would a progressive shift in the Texas House mean, especially as it relates to public education?

Other News of Note

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Monuments to Workers

Lovia Gyarkye, Hammer and Hope

On a cool evening in May, LaToya Ruby Frazier gathered with friends and strangers in a basement theater at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The communion was a public event tied to the artist’s new exhibition, Monuments of Solidarity, surveying more than two decades of photographic work. After a brief introduction by the curator Roxana Marcoci, Frazier walked over to a podium at the front of the room. She wore a blue silk suit, and her hair, a dark brown mass with sandy highlights, was styled into an afro. The artist looked like a figure pulled straight from Barkley L. Hendricks’s ethereal portraits.