Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

How Trump 2.0 upended education research and statistics in one year

Jill Barshay, Hechinger Report

Inauguration Day was a time of hope for the MAGA faithful who watched President Donald Trump take his second oath of office in the Capitol rotunda. But less than a mile away, at the Department of Education, fear and uncertainty reigned. Researchers, contractors and federal staff — the corner of the Education Department that I cover — braced for potentially devastating upheaval. Would the department itself be eliminated, as Trump had promised during the campaign? Would congressionally mandated research and statistical programs move to other agencies? And, if so, which ones? Amid the unease, a small but determined force was already at work. The consequences would be profound.

RFK Jr. Blames Pills—Not Guns—for School Shootings

Mark Follman, Mother Jones

As secretary of health and human services in the second Trump administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pushed an array of pseudoscience and misinformation, foremost about vaccines. His approach has been to promote claims that are unsupported by evidence or have been disproven by scientific research and to announce that the Department of Health and Human Services is pouring resources into studying those baseless claims. He also tends to imply that questions he raises have not yet been studied when, in fact, they have been. Research has shown definitively, for example, that vaccines do not cause autism, despite Kennedy’s long-running efforts to stir that fear. In similar fashion, Kennedy is now using his post as the highest-ranking US health official to spread the claim that psychiatric drugs are a key cause of mass shootings at the nation’s schools and beyond.

Discretionary Spaces: The Power of Teaching in the Struggle for Justice in and Through Public Education

Deborah Loewenberg Ball, Educational Researcher

Although teaching is one of the most common occupations, experienced by nearly all individuals and enacted by millions of professionals, its power to reproduce or disrupt oppression is often underestimated. Situated within broader social, political, and historical contexts, teaching reflects and is shaped by enduring patterns that marginalize groups of people, forms of knowledge, and ways of knowing. Yet this is not only a macro-level phenomenon; through everyday micro-interactions, teaching can nurture students’ flourishing or constrain their learning and identities. Building on scholarship on discretion in professional practice and policy implementation, I argue that teaching’s potency derives in significant part from the discretionary spaces inherent in its enactment. These spaces of interpretation, choice, and action are both ubiquitous and structured by broader systems of oppression. 

Language, Culture, and Power

As Immigrant Youth Come Under Attack, These Schools Are Trying to Protect Them

Eleanor J. Bader, Truthout

In Sanctuary School: Innovating to Empower Immigrant Youth, Molloy University assistant professor of education Chandler Patton Miranda presents an in-depth and emotionally resonant look at a network of 31 small public high schools in seven states that provide “radical welcome, protection and empowerment” to migrant youth from 119 countries. The Internationals Network for Public Schools was initially founded in 2004 in Queens, New York, but it now has expanded to serve schools in California, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., among other locations. This intentional network of immigrant-oriented schools focuses on student well-being and sidesteps standardized testing to allow newcomers to the U.S. to take the time they need — often exceeding the four years typically allotted for high school completion — to acclimate to life in the country. Classrooms are laboratories for collaborative, project-based learning, and instructors and staff ensure that students have the material and social supports they need to succeed.

The Australian school spearheading an Indigenous language revival

Ella Archibald-Binge and Carly Earl, The Guardian

There are several words for “morning” in the Gumbaynggirr language but bambuuda is Anne-Marie Briggs’ favourite. Drawn from bamburr, meaning soft and gentle, it speaks to the quiet moments before sunrise, literally translating as “in the softness”. “Doesn’t it just melt your heart?” says Anne-Marie, sitting at the kitchen table of the Coffs Harbour home she shares with her 12-year-old son, Darruy. The pair have found an easy morning routine since moving to Coffs three years ago. On a bright spring day Darruy wolfs down his Weet-Bix before strolling across the road to the small independent school that has been making headlines for its unique approach to education on the New South Wales mid-north coast.

Listening to Muslim Students

Abdulilah Al-Dubai and George Theoharis, School Administrator Magazine

During the early part of his senior year at a suburban high school in Central New York, Sofyan, a Muslim boy, and his classmates met with their guidance counselor about their postsecondary plans. The counselor went around the room asking each of Sofyan’s white peers “Where do you want to go to college?” and responding affirmatively to the universities they mentioned. When the counselor got to Sofyan, she said, “Do you even want to go to college?” When Sofyan replied with his list of four-year colleges, she countered, “You know, community college is a great option for you.” Sofyan was offended because he and his family aspired beyond community college. He felt this disparate treatment was because of his brown skin and religion.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Climate Education beyond COP26 [Audio]

Christina Kwauk & Radhika Iyengar, FreshEd

Today we take stock of climate education, its past and its future. With me are Christina Kwauk and Radhika Iyengar, who have recently co-edited the book, Curriculum and Learning for Climate Action: Toward an SDG 4.7 Roadmap for Systems Change. They argue that COP26 has been disappointing in terms of education and climate action, and encourage everyone to focus on local action and change. Christina Kwauk is the Research Director at Unbounded Associates and a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institute. Radhika Iyengar is Director of Education at the Center for Sustainable Development, Earth Institute, Columbia University. 

California’s Child Farmworkers: Exhausted, Underpaid, and Toiling in Toxic Fields

Robert Lopez, American Prospect

The summer sun burned through the clouds in California’s Salinas Valley, where a bounty of berries and leafy green vegetables grows across this rich farmland renowned as the “Salad Bowl of the World.” Jose, a quiet 14-year-old, was squatting and bending over for hours with other workers in a sprawling strawberry field. Jose, seen at 13, picks strawberries in the Salinas Valley. He started working in the fields when he was 11 years old and has injured his ankles and knees after falling down at work. He says he has been paid piece-rate wages for less than minimum wage and he has worked in fields on hot summer days where employers failed to provide shade. He also described working in a field where a strong smell of chemicals gave him a headache.

The pickers, many of them also minors, snapped berries from plants and placed them in plastic cartons, eight of them in a cardboard box. They moved quickly along the long rows that lined the field.

Brief But Spectacular [Video]

Anixia Davila, PBS Newshour

In this season of gathering around the table, we hear from self-proclaimed proud “AG youth” Anixia Davila from Salinas Valley, California, known as the “salad bowl of the world.” Davila shares her Brief But Spectacular take on what she’s learned about leadership, responsibility and community through farming.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Oklahoma university instructor on leave after failing Bible-based essay on gender

Safiyah Riddle, AP News

An instructor at the University of Oklahoma has been placed on leave after a student complained that she received a failing grade on a paper that cited the Bible to assert that the “belief in multiple genders” was “demonic.” Samantha Fulnecky, 20, filed a complaint with the administration, the latest flashpoint in the ongoing debate over academic freedom on college campuses amid President Donald Trump’s push to end diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and restrict how campuses discuss issues of race, gender and sexuality. “OU remains firmly committed to fairness, respect and protecting every student’s right to express sincerely held religious beliefs,” the university wrote in an email on Wednesday.

AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself

Ronald Purser, Current Affairs

I used to think that the hype surrounding artificial intelligence was just that—hype. I was skeptical when ChatGPT made its debut. The media frenzy, the breathless proclamations of a new era—it all felt familiar. I assumed it would blow over like every tech fad before it. I was wrong. But not in the way you might think. The panic came first. Faculty meetings erupted in dread: “How will we detect plagiarism now?” “Is this the end of the college essay?” “Should we go back to blue books and proctored exams?” My business school colleagues suddenly behaved as if cheating had just been invented.

The Trump administration’s dangerous obsession with Jews [Video]

Peter Beinart, The Beinart Notebook

So, the day after Thanksgiving, the Trump administration announced another agreement with an American university—in this case Northwestern University. And it’s really striking if you look at the language that Trump’s Department of Justice uses in describing the terms of this agreement.

So, let me just quote a couple of elements from it.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Can math equations solve inequality? [Audio]

Eugenia Cheng and Meghna Chakrabarti, On Point 

Eugenia Cheng already loved math by the time she was in kindergarten, she went on to specialize in math, in category theory specifically, and she earned a tenured position teaching math in England. But then she had a change of heart. She now teaches math to budding artists at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and writes books to help non-mathematically inclined people understand how math fits into their everyday lives. She’s out now with a new book. It’s called “Unequal: The mathematics of when things do and don’t add up.” Eugenia Cheng, welcome back to On Point.

50 years after the birth of special education, some fear for its future under Trump [Audio]

Cory Turner, NPR

Fifty years ago, just after Thanksgiving of 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, the landmark law that created special education as it exists today, and guaranteed all children with disabilities the right to a “free appropriate public education.” Yet, “rather than celebrating progress, we face a crisis,” warned a recent letter to Congress, signed by hundreds of disability, civil rights and education groups. That crisis, according to the letter, is “the dismantling of the very infrastructure Congress created to ensure children with disabilities could reach their full potential.”

A Spectacle by Design: A Racialized Performance for Donor Dollars

Abbie Cohen, AERA Open

Utilizing critical and participatory ethnography, this paper explores how racialized power dynamics impact the relationship between a youth-serving, community-based education nonprofit and its donors. Given the nonprofit’s position between the public and private sectors, this study examines how the organization balances the donors’ interests against public school students’ needs. This paper analyzes the nonprofit’s performance for its private donors and how private donors perform for the nonprofit. Combining Marxist theorist Guy Debord’s society of spectacle with historian Cedric Robinson’s racial capitalism framework illustrates how the nonprofit and its funders perform racialized, classed, and gendered acts. My findings capture these complex power dynamics and the democratic implications of the dynamic between a youth-serving, community-based education nonprofit and private philanthropy.

Democracy and the Public Interest

The Claims of Close Reading

Johanna Winant, Boston Review

Hollowed out. That’s how I frequently described West Virginia University during the nine years I worked there before leaving this summer. There was a library, but it bought fewer and fewer books. The English department had a lovely old brick building, but there were hallways of empty offices after colleagues left and weren’t replaced. Some beneficiaries were identifiable: upper administrators were paid much better than those at comparable institutions when just about everyone else was paid worse. It was easy to compare the university to its state’s mountains: a site of extraction, a public good that had been plundered by the wealthy and left as a shell.

Getting Youth Engaged in Democracy

Laura Brill, Stanford Social Innovation Review

In the 2024 election, as in every US election going back decades, tens of millions of Americans, including more than 10 million young people, were not registered to vote and therefore were unable to cast a ballot. Voter registration is an administrative process to create a list of voters who are eligible to participate in elections. In the United States, many otherwise-eligible voters are left out because they are not registered. The exclusionary impact is greatest for groups that are most marginalized, including those who are not white, have low incomes, and/or do not go to college, drive, or speak English as their primary language, and young people. Many people assume that young people turn out to vote at low rates, even when they are registered. But that is not the case, at least in major national elections.

A Republican homeschooling mom came to love her public schools. Now she’s fighting other conservatives she thinks will destroy them

Emma Epperly, Idaho Education News

Moms answer other moms, especially when it involves their children and schools. Yet here it was, Election Day in the parking lot of Lakeland High School in North Idaho and Suzanne Gallus — a hyperorganized Republican mom who once homeschooled her seven children and is now a public-school advocate and school board campaign operative — was staring at her phone. Stunned. “Nobody’s responding,” she said, pacing in a teal puffer on the chilly November day. “I’m sending texts to these parents, right? Like ‘Hey, Tina, don’t forget to vote today.’ I sent 10 of those texts and nothing. And these are people I know!” Not 20 feet away, Mary White sat in a tent with a heater, an “All Aboard the Trump Train” flag, and a sign identifying her as a “MAGA REPUBLICAN” who serves as the precinct 305 chair on the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee, known locally as the KCRCC. She was doing what Gallus was — only for the other side, reflecting a division unfolding around the country that has traditional conservative Republicans opposing MAGA Republicans.

Other News of Note

Newly Declassified Records Suggest Parents Collaborated With the FBI to Spy on Their Rebellious Teens During the 1960s

Aaron G. Fountain Jr., Smithsonian Magazine

On a spring day in March 1969, Laura Mackay Irwin sat in her home in Charlotte, North Carolina, and typed a letter she’d never imagined she would write. A former stenographer at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Irwin addressed her note to the agency’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, as a plea for help. Irwin’s 17-year-old son, Basil Jr., had joined the Charlotte Student Union, a new organization demanding a more relevant high school curriculum and a greater voice in school decisions. The group’s aims were modest compared with similar organizations like the New York High School Student Union, a student rights group that called for “an immediate end to the draft” and “community control of the schools and every other community facility.” To Irwin, however, her son’s activism didn’t signal ordinary teenage rebellion. She sensed something far more sinister. “These teenagers are not really prepared to cope with the challenges of the groups that are operating in the colleges and trying to destroy our educational system,” Irwin wrote to Hoover. “It is now apparent they are beginning to operate in the high schools.” Teenagers lacked the maturity necessary to resist manipulation, she thought.

Rest and resistance are intertwined. Rosa Parks understood that.

Gabriella Gladney, The 19th

Self-care is a bit of a buzzword these days. But for Rosa Parks, it was a deliberate practice and a means of survival in her later years. Long after she refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Parks practiced yoga as a way to support her body and mind. This little-known part of her history is a piece of a bigger picture: Black activists have used self-care as a tool for decades.

The 85-Year-Old Activist Trying to Block the Trump Presidential Library Plan

Patricia Mazzei, New York Times

Marvin Dunn, a Florida historian and activist, became so angry this fall after a public college quietly handed over a prime downtown property for President Trump’s future library that he sued. A judge sided with him, ruling in October that the trustees of Miami Dade College had failed to provide reasonable public notice before their vote. The college appealed, saying it had done nothing wrong. But faced with the prospect of a protracted and expensive trial, the trustees reconsidered. They met again on Tuesday and redid their vote, this time after hearing for more than three hours from over 70 people, most of them in opposition.