Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Madeline Morgan fought to teach Black history in schools. 80 years on, her vision is not yet realized.

Michael Hines, Chalkbeat

“…we still haven’t got all our rights, and that’s that.” The words were written by Louis Brown,* a Black eighth grader at Emerson Elementary in Chicago. I first read them in late 2020, against a backdrop formed by the racial and economic inequities exposed by the pandemic, the seemingly daily drumbeat of police killings, and the surging protest movement for Black Lives. They struck me in their rawness, their immediacy. Brown, however, had written his words in the spring of 1943, sitting at a desk in school that had long since been shuttered. I was reading his work in the archives of the George Cleveland Hall Branch Library and its Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection, where much of the city’s African American past is preserved. As a historian of education, finding the voices of students in historical archives is rare. When those voices speak to the present in ways that collapse the distance of nearly 80 years, it is even more remarkable.

Teachers of Color Are Linked to Social-Emotional, Academic Gains for All Students

Madeline Will, Education Week

Teachers of color tend to bring specific practices and mindsets into the classroom that benefit all students, a new study finds—the latest addition to the body of research that emphasizes the importance of recruiting and retaining these teachers, who make up just 21 percent of the workforce. The new study reaffirms that teachers of color are linked to positive academic, social-emotional, and behavioral student outcomes and finds that these effects are driven, at least in part, by mindsets and practices aligned to what’s known as culturally responsive teaching. “We think of culturally responsive teaching as being multidimensional, having multiple components to it,” said David Blazar, the study’s author and an assistant professor of education policy and economics at the University of Maryland.

Teachers in Puerto Rico protest for better wages and pensions [AUDIO]

Adrian Florido, Alejandra Marquez Janse, & Christopher Intagliata, NPR

It’s been about a week since close to three quarters of Puerto Rico’s more than 20,000 public school teachers decided not to show up for work. They say they’re fed up with the dismal pay, made worse by the fact that soon, changes to their pension system will make surviving as a teacher on the island even harder. A march and protest today, originally planned as a teacher’s strike, has expanded to include a wide range of public sector employees, from firefighters to police, who say they are bearing the brunt of Puerto Rico’s ongoing debt crisis. We’re joined now by Jose Cintron. He’s a middle school English teacher in the town of Barceloneta.

Language, Culture, and Power

Students are suspended less when their teacher has the same race or ethnicity

Matthew Shirrell, The Conversation

Black, Latino and Asian American students are less likely to be suspended from school when they have more teachers who share their racial or ethnic background. This is the central finding of a research study that two colleagues – Travis J. Bristol and Tolani Britton – and I released in October 2021 through the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. To figure out if a teacher’s race or ethnicity affected suspensions, we analyzed 10 years of data – from 2007 through 2016 – on suspensions for every student in fourth through eighth grades in New York City public schools. We followed individual students over time. We examined whether the proportion of teachers of the same race or ethnicity these students were assigned in a given year affected how likely they were to be suspended.

Creating Space to Talk about Race [Audio]

Rose, Khor, The Young and the Woke

For over a year now, conservative politicians and pundits have weaponized “critical race theory” in attempts to turn out voters. Enraged parents have been protesting at school board meetings about what they fear is the indoctrination of their children.  Few, if any of them, have ever stepped into a classroom where students of different backgrounds are discussing race. What would the students themselves have to say about the impact of discussing race in the classroom? In this episode, guest host and producer Rose Khor shares the voices of a racially diverse group of students in Heath Madom’s class at Oakland Tech. These students recently graduated from a career pathway at the school that discusses the intersection of race, policy, and law. Take a listen to what the students have to say about the role of discussing race in schools.

Students walk out at West Virginia school after Christian revival

NPR

Between calculus and European history classes at a West Virginia public high school, 16-year-old Cameron Mays and his classmates were told by their teacher to go to an evangelical Christian revival assembly. When students arrived at the event in the school’s auditorium, they were instructed to close their eyes and raise their arms in prayer, Mays said. The teens were asked to give their lives over to Jesus to find purpose and salvation. Those who did not follow the Bible would go to hell when they died, they were told. The Huntington High School junior sent a text to his father. “Is this legal?” he asked.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Families of kids continuing to learn remotely are cut off from P-EBT food program [AUDIO]

Cory Turner, NPR

Updated federal guidance means many low-income families that want their children to keep learning remotely are losing access to a school program that helped them pay for meals. When this school year began, most families sent their children back into classrooms, but not all. Because of lingering COVID concerns, some parents and caregivers enrolled their kids in state- or district-run virtual academies. For some low-income families, that decision has come with a consequence they weren’t expecting. They’re now being cut off from a federal program run by the USDA that helped put food on the table. NPR’s Cory Turner explains.

Should we screen all kids for dyslexia? [AUDIO]

Education Beat Podcast, Ed Source

Gov. Gavin Newsom and state legislators are pushing to develop a tool that could be used to screen every young student in California schools for dyslexia. A mother shares how her son went years without help for his dyslexia – still reading at a kindergarten level in sixth grade. What can be done to keep children with dyslexia from slipping through the cracks?

What a janitor in L.A. does in a workday

Jenny Mejia, Washington Post

Name: Jenny Mejia.  Age: 38.  Location: Los Angeles. Job title: Janitor. Previous jobs: I have been a janitor for 16 years. I have held both day and night porter positions in several Los Angeles commercial business buildings. What led me to my current role: I started in the janitorial industry after I immigrated to the United States from Honduras in 2005. It is a job that helps me to support my family — I am a single mother with two young sons who are both in elementary school. Property service workers, like myself, are front-line workers who play a critical role in protecting the health of occupants in workplaces across the nation. This has come to light since the beginning of the pandemic. I am proud of the work I do and how I provide for my family.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Every Child an Emperor:  On Maria Montessori

Rivka Galchen, Harpers

She hires the daughter of a custodian to teach kindergarten. It is 1907 in a poor neighborhood in Rome, where there has never been a kindergarten before. An agency tasked with improving neighborhoods in the city is trying to provide a place for children to go while their parents are working, and Maria Montessori has been asked to run the program. Montessori instructs the inexperienced teacher that the children should be allowed to lie on the floor or sit under the table—to do whatever they want. Observe them closely and tell me what you notice, she says. The new teacher reports back: the children are more interested in helping her sweep than in playing with the donated toys. Montessori writes this down. One day when Montessori is on her way to the classroom, she notices a peaceful baby girl with her mother in the courtyard. She invites them in and challenges the young children to be as quiet as the baby. This goes well. Montessori decides to make a ritual out of it: a period of silence for the children, one that ends when each child is called by name into the next room. This, also, the children love. The practice is adopted.

We struggle to measure quality child care — and even more to fund it

Christina Samuels, Hechinger Report

When Sasha Shunk first opened a child care center in her Maine home nearly 20 years ago, she knew she would have to stand out among the nearly 3,000 other home-based child care providers operating in the state at the time. “I always knew there were other child care providers a road away or the street down from me,” said Shunk, who cares for 12 children at $325 a week, each, and has about 40 more children on a waitlist. “I looked for training, I sought out ways to differentiate myself.”

The Critical Flaw Behind Teacher Evaluations

Peter Greene, The Progressive

For several decades, everyone from President George H.W. Bush to then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton believed it was possible to measure outcomes (“deliverables,” some called them) to separate the educational wheat from the chaff. Teachers would be held accountable for real data—numbers generated by tests. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) had its bipartisan birth in 2001. Central to the law was not only to collect test scores, but to break them down by subgroups. This meant that, at least on paper, Black students or low-income students would not have their struggles hidden in a school average score.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Raising pay in public K–12 schools is critical to solving staffing shortages

David Cooper and Sebastian Martinez Hickey, Economic Policy Institute

Ever since students began returning to classrooms in the late summer and fall of 2021, countless news stories have described intense staffing shortages in primary and secondary schools.1 The pandemic has wreaked havoc on the country’s K–12 educational workforce, with overworked educators retiring or leaving the profession, insufficient substitute teachers to fill in when COVID hits a district, too few paraprofessionals and teaching assistants there to support students who are struggling after more than a year of virtual learning, not enough bus drivers to get students to and from school, and skeleton crews of custodial and food service workers trying to make do.

Saving the school where kids were paddled for speaking Spanish

Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times

Hiding in plain sight on a dusty corner of this remote west Texas town, the Blackwell School stands as a lasting reminder of what Mexican American students endured during decades of segregation. “I learned about racism here in Marfa,” said Jessi Silva, 73, who attended the school as a child in the 1950s and 1960s. Sitting in the schoolhouse last month, Silva gestured to a wooden paddle she said teachers used to spank classmates for speaking Spanish. Opened in 1909 as a three-room “Mexican school,” Blackwell expanded to half a dozen buildings, educating more than 4,000 children before it closed in 1965.

Profoundly Antiracist Questions About Schools

David Fuentes, Teachers College Record

There are deeply ingrained structural inequalities in schools that require immediate action. As antiracist educators, we must ask questions about school equity to disrupt the inequality of school outcomes we continue to see today. Who teaches the students? Who gets new schools? Who graduates from high school, and who goes to college? Who gets labeled and sorted? What can (antiracist) educators do? These questions are profoundly antiracist because they are overwhelmingly multicultural. By asking profoundly antiracist questions about schools today, I highlight areas and issues of schooling that require immediate action, antiracist efforts, to address the inequalities that exist as evidenced by educational statistics. Based on the analysis of school outcomes presented in this research note, it becomes clear that Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) students continue to experience disparate school outcomes in America. Such inequalities reveal that BIPOC children are taught by underpaid teachers, learn in schools that are falling apart, are labeled and sorted at disproportionate rates, and endure a curriculum about other people, and generally are being underserved in schools, as evidenced by the school outcomes. Educators must take immediate antiracist actions to ensure that school equity does not continue to be defined by racial inequality.

Democracy and the Public Interest

California offers graduation honor to encourage active civic engagement

John Fensterwald, EdSource

Fresno Unified is among the school districts encouraging students to become civically engaged and in the process earn a seal affixed to their high school diploma that recognizes their involvement. The State Seal of Civic Engagement recognizes not only that students understand the democratic process but also apply their knowledge to address issues or problems they care deeply about in school or the community. “In a time of rancor, the seal in my mind could not have a greater importance,” Superintendent Bob Nelson said. He spoke last week the morning after the president of his school board shut down a raucous meeting when one board member and a member of the public engaged in a shouting match and a contingent of vaccination opponents showed up to lash out at another board member for posting a sarcastic tweet mocking their views.

Push to Remove LGBTQ Books in One County Could Signal Rising Partisanship on School Boards

Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica

Nearly seven years ago, Melanie Graft’s 4-year-old daughter was in the children’s section of her local North Texas library when she picked up a book about an LGBTQ pride parade. Within the colorful pages of the book, “This Day in June,” children and adults celebrate with rainbow flags and signs promoting equality and love over hate. Adults embrace and kiss one another. Alarmed, Graft launched a campaign against the book and another about a boy who likes to wear dresses, suggesting that their presence in the library foisted inappropriate themes on unsuspecting children. By June 2015, the Hood County Library Advisory Board had received more than 50 complaints asking that the two books be removed from the shelves of the children’s section. The board refused, saying the books did not promote homosexuality, as some complaints had suggested, and arguing that the library already required parents of young children to accompany them and check out materials. Librarian Courtney Kincaid called “This Day in June” a tool to teach respect and acceptance of the LGBTQ community, but she agreed to move it to the adult section. She kept “My Princess Boy” in the children’s section.

Book Bans Are on the Rise. But Librarians and Authors Are Fighting Back.

Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation

The idea of banning books conjures images of piles of hardcovers in the street going up in flames. But over the past few decades in the United States, book banning has taken on a decidedly more genteel character. It has taken place in deliberative school board meetings and in quick after-school chats between librarians and concerned parents.

And incidents of this quieter version of book banning have recently spiked: A group of Texas school districts reported 75 attempts in the first four months of the 2021–2022 school year to censor children’s access to books. The number of attempts over the same period last year? Just one.

Other News of Note

Ally: From Noun to Verb

Robin D. G. Kelley and Vijay Iyer, Boston Review

Robin D. G. Kelley: The word “ally” is often used to identify those who are supportive of other’s struggles, and it’s a word that has had a lot of currency in the era of Black Lives Matter and Occupy. What would you say the term means to you, especially in the context of making music?

Vijay Iyer: That’s a really profound and profoundly American question. I’ve been advising a student—by his own account, a privileged white kid from the South—who’s doing a project on Thomas Dorsey and Rosetta Tharpe, who were iconic innovators of gospel music. For the project, he’s writing about them, but then with an ensemble he’s also to present his own versions of some of the music that made them famous. And he’s been having a crisis around, basically, “Who am I in relation to all of this?”