Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Randi Weingarten on the Peace Movement in Israel (Audio)

Jon Wiener and Randi Weingarten, Start Making Sense (The Nation Podcast)

Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, spent Thanksgiving weekend in Israel; she reports on meetings with shared society groups and peace movement leaders, and on the role of the US in bringing not just peace but equality and justice to Palestinians.

For Republican Governors, Civics Is the Latest Education Battleground

Dana Goldstein, New York Times

Lisa Phillip, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at an Orlando charter school, appreciates many of Florida’s new guidelines for teaching civics. She has enjoyed discussing, as the state requires, the advantages that the U.S. government and economy have over socialism and communism — something that some of her immigrant students feel innately, she said. mAnd she doesn’t mind teaching about “the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition” on the nation’s founding documents. The subject prompted her students at Central Florida Leadership Academy to reflect on how the country’s politics, they believed, fell short of the basic morality in the Ten Commandments.

Temecula Valley Unified CRT ban has created a hostile school environment, lawsuit says

Diama Lambert, Ed Source

Cultivating a sense of belonging to spark students’ enthusiasm for learning

November 30, 2023 – EdSource brought together a panel of experts to discuss what schools can do to re-engage students. There was one very strong theme − the need for students to feel they belong. Temecula Valley Unified’s school board has created an environment of fear and divisiveness on school campuses since it passed a resolution banning critical race theory, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday. The lawsuit filed in Riverside Superior Court on behalf of seven students, three teachers and the district’s teachers union, alleges that the resolution has resulted in the censorship of teachers and has taken away students’ fundamental rights to an education, violates the California Constitution because it is vague, infringes on the right of students to receive information and violates their rights to equal protection. The plaintiffs want the court to declare the board resolution unconstitutional and order the board to revoke it. “We will be seeking an injunction to end the hatred and the division sowed by this resolution,” said Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel, a nonprofit public interest law firm at a news conference Wednesday morning.

Language, Culture, and Power

AP African American studies framework gets another round of edits: What’s changed and why?

Ileana Najarro, Education Week

Phaedra Trethan, USA TODAY

The College Board reworked the recommended course material for its disputed Advanced Placement course in African American Studies, sharing an updated framework Wednesday that largely preserves the current topics and expands on others, and offers teachers options on subject matter that has drawn scrutiny from some conservatives. The course, first offered as part of a pilot program to high school students during the 2022-23 school year, covers Black history through an interdisciplinary lens, touching on historical events and figures, as well as music, art, literature and culture. It took about a decade to fully formulate the coursework, according to the College Board, which worked with more than 200 educators at colleges, universities and other institutions across the country. And while it’s proven wildly popular − 60 schools offered the course in its first pilot year, and about 13,000 students in nearly 700 schools across 40 states are taking it in the second year, 2023-24 − the course also has been condemned by some on the right.

Colorado schools dramatically adjusting to teach migrant students – many who’ve never been to school before

Jenny Brundin, Colorado Public Radio

Ashley has seen more than most 13-year-olds. More than most people of any age. She’s walked alongside busy, truck-laden highways and through hot, humid jungles filled with smugglers, criminal gangs, and snakes. She’s crossed through at least five countries. She’s taken buses that took her to people who made her family pay or they’d be detained or kidnapped. And now the Venezuelan teen with long curly brown hair is sitting, headphones on, at a desk in a southeast Denver classroom.  She’s listening to a story about the year 1621. It’s the story of how the Wampanoag people, using 10,000 years of accumulated knowledge, taught other newcomers to this continent, pilgrims, how to survive a harsh winter. She listens to the pre-Thanksgiving lesson in English. “There are times when I don’t understand, but I try to get a bit of what they are saying and then get an idea about the topic,” Ashley said in Spanish. But she said she’s just happy to be here, safe and learning, though she worries about her grandmother left back in Venezuela with an injured leg.

Philadelphia reduces school-based arrests by 91% since 2013 – researchers explain the effects of keeping kids out of the legal system

Amanda NeMoyer and Naomi Goldstein, The Conversation

Across the United States, arrest rates for young people under age 18 have been declining for decades. However, the proportion of youth arrests associated with school incidents has increased.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, K-12 schools referred nearly 230,000 students to law enforcement during the school year that began in 2017. These referrals and the 54,321 reported school-based arrests that same year were mostly for minor misbehavior like marijuana possession, as opposed to more serious offenses like bringing a gun to school. School-based arrests are one part of the school-to-prison pipeline, through which students – especially Black and Latine students and those with disabilities – are pushed out of their schools and into the legal system. Getting caught up in the legal system has been linked to negative health, social and academic outcomes, as well as increased risk for future arrest.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Lacking counselors, US schools turn to the booming business of online therapy

Jocelyn Gecker, AP News

Trouble with playground bullies started for Maria Ishoo’s daughter in elementary school. Girls ganged up, calling her “fat” and “ugly.” Boys tripped and pushed her. The California mother watched her typically bubbly second-grader retreat into her bedroom and spend afternoons curled up in bed. For Valerie Aguirre’s daughter in Hawaii, a spate of middle school “friend drama” escalated into violence and online bullying that left the 12-year-old feeling disconnected and lonely. Both children received help through telehealth therapy, a service that schools around the country are offering in response to soaring mental health struggles among American youth.

Rural students face persistent access barriers to counselors, gifted programming

Kara Arundel, K-12 Dive

Students attending rural schools have less access to school psychologists and counselors than their nonrural peers. They also may face other educational, mental and physical well-being barriers impacting rural areas, according to research from the National Rural Education Association. The report, which is the latest in a series of research on rural students, also highlights areas of progress, including increased diversity of rural students and a slightly higher graduation rate than their nonrural peers.

Inside America’s School Internet Censorship Machine

Todd Feathers and Dhruv Mehrotra, Wired

Around dinner time one night in July, a student in Albuquerque, New Mexico, googled “suicide prevention hotline.” They were automatically blocked. The student tried again, using their Albuquerque Public Schools district–issued laptop to search for “contact methods for suicide.” Blocked. They were turned away again a few hours later when attempting to access a webpage on the federally-funded Suicide Prevention Resource Center. More than a dozen times that night, the student tried to access online mental health resources, and the district’s web filter blocked their requests for help every time. In the following weeks, students and staff across Albuquerque tried and failed to reach crisis mental health resources on district computers. An eighth grader googled “suicide hotline” on their take-home laptop, a ninth grader looked up “suicide hotline number,” a high school counselor googled “who is a mandated reporter for suicide in New Mexico,” and another counselor at an elementary school tried to download a PDF of the district’s suicide prevention protocol. Blocked, blocked, blocked—all in a state with among the highest suicide rates in the US.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

In Florida’s Hot Political Climate, Some Faculty Have Had Enough

Stephanie Saul, New York Times

Gov. Ron DeSantis had just taken office in 2019 when the University of Florida lured Neil H. Buchanan, a prominent economist and tax law scholar, from George Washington University. Now, just four years after he started at the university, Dr. Buchanan has given up his tenured job and headed north to teach in Toronto. In a recent column on a legal commentary website, he accused Florida of “open hostility to professors and to higher education more generally.” He is not the only liberal-leaning professor to leave one of Florida’s highly regarded public universities.  Many are giving up coveted tenured positions and blaming their departures on Desantis and his efforts to reshape the higher education system to fit his conservative principle.

Cal State union stages first of one-day strikes over faculty salaries

Mikhail Zinshteyn, Cal Matters

The California Faculty Association is seeking a 12% pay increase, while university officials counter with 5% in each of the next three years. As far back as May the faculty at the California State University threatened to strike if management wouldn’t meet their wage and benefit demands. That prophecy is on full display today as the California Faculty Association has begun the first of four one-day strikes, starting at Cal Poly Pomona. Tomorrow through Thursday the association is planning one-day strikes at Cal State campuses in Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco. The four campuses with walkouts this week together enroll about 105,000 students. The union vows to escalate the work stoppages early next year if university leaders don’t meet their demands.

As housing crisis rages, one CSU fines students for sleeping in campus parking lots

Ryan Fonseca, Los Angeles Times

Some people seeking degrees in California’s two- and four-year colleges face a stark choice: pay for tuition or pay for housing. For many students, that means  attending classes by day and sleeping in cars, vans or RVs at night. Times higher education reporter Debbie Truong spoke with Cal Poly Humboldt students who formed a community while staying in the G11 parking lot on their campus.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Taliban’s abusive education policies harm boys as well as girls in Afghanistan, rights group says

Rahim Faiez, Washington Post

The Taliban’s “abusive” educational policies are harming boys as well as girls in Afghanistan, according to a Human Rights Watch report published Wednesday. The Taliban have been globally condemned for banning girls and women from secondary school and university, but the rights group says there has been less attention to the deep harm inflicted on boys’ education.

Discrimination Experiences Shape Most Asian Americans’ Lives

Neil G. Ruiz, Carolyne Im, and And Ziyao Tian, Pew Research

The spike in incidents of anti-Asian discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic sparked national conversations about race and racial discrimination concerning Asian American. But discrimination against Asian Americans is not new. From the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, to denial of the right to become naturalized U.S. citizens until the 1940s, to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, to backlash against Muslims, Sikhs and South Asians after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, most Asian Americans have faced discrimination and exclusion while being treated as foreigners throughout their long history in the United States. At the same time, Asian Americans have often been upheld as a model for how other racial and ethnic minorities should behave – especially in comparison with Black Americans and Latinos.

How America’s Broken Promise to Millions of Students Became the Status Quo

Katie Thornton, Mother Jones

In the early 2010s, after working as an elementary school teacher of students with disabilities in Kansas for a couple years, Kimberly Knackstedt was finally seeing her work pay off. She merged classes with a general education teacher’s for part of the day, meaning her students were spending more time with their neurotypical peers—an approach that has long been shown to benefit students. “It was so successful,” she says. “It was a fantastic model.” She was also working closely with her students and their families to help them understand how to get the services guaranteed to them—resources such as extra time for tests, interpretation for those with hearing or vision disabilities, or physical therapy and psychological assistance.

Democracy and the Public Interest

The Leadership Challenge of Student Protests

John Rogers, Joseph Kahne, Alexander Kwako, Principal Leadership

School leaders across the nation have noted a rising tide of student activism. The focus, scope, and tactics of the protests have ranged widely. Student protestors have addressed gun safety, LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, climate justice, school dress codes, and more. Some student protests have been coordinated by national organizations such as Everytown for Gun Safety, and some have risen organically from a small group of students who want change. What should principals think about this heightened civic energy? To be sure, student protests present leadership challenges. Activist students aim to create change. Through protests, they may disrupt established schedules, highlight disagreements within diverse communities, or undermine support for long-standing school policies and practices. But student protests also present unique learning possibilities. Protests potentially provide young people opportunities to practice sharing their ideas and working together to make a difference. And, through dialogue and reflection, student protestors can critically assess and learn from their successes and their failures.

How should principals respond to student protests? Some helpful answers to this question emerge from a study we conducted with nearly 500 high school principals across the United States following the massive nationwide student protests that followed the tragic 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL. Here’s the short version: Principals need to understand both their legal obligation to ensure student rights and their educational obligation to promote students’ democratic development.

Dos Pueblos High School Students Walk Out of Class in Support of Teachers

Callie Fausey

Hundreds of Dos Pueblos High School students walked two miles from their school’s campus in Goleta to Girsh Park on Friday morning, becoming a unified voice in support of their teachers who have ceased all extracurricular activities outside of their contracts. Teachers around the district recently, and hesitantly, closed their doors and started “working to contract” to bring attention to their demands for better wages and benefits during the current bargaining cycle with the Santa Barbara Unified School District. However, the student activists are not mad at their teachers. Quite the opposite. After marching across the freeway, the group gathered around the park’s center, waving signs and booing, cheering, and chanting with their classmates while planes flew overhead and kids played catch in the adjacent field. One student was scribbling with a Sharpie on notebook paper, making new signs and handing them out as the organizers addressed the crowd.

GOP states are embracing vouchers. Wealthy parents are benefitting.

Andrew Atterbury, Politico

Republican-controlled legislatures in Florida, Iowa, Arkansas and elsewhere passed massive expansions to school vouchers this year, fueled by anger over pandemic-era school closures and disagreements over what kids are taught. The new taxpayer-funded scholarships grant families thousands of dollars to educate their kids how they see fit — whether it’s through private schools, homeschooling or some other alternative to public classrooms. “A lot of the families who showed up at the school board meetings upset at the curriculum, they’re seeing school choice as a good solution,” Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children who has been called the “school choice evangelist,” said in an interview.

Other News of Note

A creation story for Indigenous and nature-based learning

Anya Kamanetz, Hechinger Report

As part of a new program, every third grader in Albuquerque Public Schools spends a day at the Los Padillas Wildlife Sanctuary just outside the city. There, a wide variety of local landscapes are packed into five acres: a meadow, piñon, juniper and cottonwood trees, an arroyo and even a pond — a rarity in the desert. “All the way into October they can fish in the pond with a net,” said Monie Corona, an environmental education resource teacher for the district. “There’s cattails, dragonflies. For the kids to feel like they’re playing, but they’re actually learning — that to me is the key thing.” The sanctuary borders the black mesas to the west and to the east and the Rio Grande bosque — a term for a forest near a river bank. To the south is the Pueblo of Isleta, one of New Mexico’s many Native American communities: There are 19 different sovereign Pueblos, plus Apache and Navajo communities, across the state. Research on the physical, psychological and academic benefits of outdoor learning for kids is well-established, and is now informing the development of climate education.

The Missed Opportunity for Public Schools and Climate Change

Arianna Prothero, Education Week

K-12 school systems are vital to cities’ plans to mitigate the effects of climate change. But while a growing number of cities are creating climate action plans, school districts often get left out of the equation. That’s a missed opportunity, say the authors of a recent report from This Is Planet Ed, an initiative of the Aspen Institute. Schools are not only positioned to both promote climate change literacy and prepare students for the clean energy jobs of the future, but they’re also a significant source of greenhouse gases. In many cities, school districts are among the largest building owners, transportation managers, and employers, and they should be included in any efforts to mitigate climate change, the report argues. Collectively, U.S. public schools operate 480,000 buses and serve 7 billion meals annually, the growing, production, and transport of which produces greenhouse gases in addition to food and plastic waste. Districts are positioned to significantly influence municipal climate action initiatives—if they are included.

Critical climate education is crucial for fast and just transformations

Hanne Svarstad, Alfredo Jornet, Glen P. Peters, Tom G. Griffiths & Tor A. Benjaminsen, Nature Climate Change

If rapid and just transformations to low-carbon societies are to take place, citizens need to obtain the necessary knowledge and skills to critically examine and choose adequate climate policy options. An emphasis on critical climate education research and implementation is therefore required. Climate mitigation is evolving too slowly compared with the pledges and ambitions to limit global warming to “well below 2.0 °C”. A range of climate mitigation strategies have been implemented or are being planned, but they vary substantially in terms of their mitigation potential and distribution of burdens. There is an urgent need for transformation processes to meet the targets of climate justice in both time and space. Climate justice in time is between present and future generations, whereas climate justice in space means justice among the present global population, and with a particular recognition of those who live under conditions of vulnerability and poverty. Policy options in line with the aims of strong climate justice are often acknowledged in general terms, but national policymakers have not prioritized strategies to achieve these aims.