Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

As States Build Barriers to Racial Justice Teaching, Educators Fight Back

Rachel M. Cohen, Rethinking Schools

Heather Smith is a middle school technology teacher in Youngstown, Ohio. In late May she watched in horror as Republicans introduced House Bill 322, legislation that would restrict how educators like her could teach about racism. “No teacher or school administrator . . . shall approve for use, make use of, or carry out standards, curricula, lesson plans, textbooks [or] instructional materials” that suggest “slavery and racism are anything other than deviations from, betrayals of, or failures to live up to the authentic founding principles of the United States,” the bill read.

New critical race theory laws have teachers scared, confused and self-censoring

Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson, Washington Post

A Utah student group was called “Black and Proud.” The principal had it renamed. A New Hampshire history teacher used to discuss current events in a unit about race and economics. No more. And Florida school officials canceled a lecture for teachers on the history of the civil rights movement while they considered whether it would violate state rules. In 13 states, new laws or directives govern how race can be taught in schools, in some cases creating reporting systems for complaints. The result, teachers and principals say, is a climate of fear around how to comply with rules they often do not understand. The new measures typically bar teachers from suggesting the United States is a racist country, from elevating one race or gender over another or implying that one race is superior. So far, they have not triggered wholesale rewrites of the curriculum, and few educators have faced prosecution or punishment. Some teachers say they see no changes at all.

The challenge of being a principal during Covid [AUDIO] 

Education Beat Podcast, EdSource

In the midst of a pandemic that has been hard for teachers, parents and students, principals are burdened with keeping the whole thing together, maintaining functioning schools amid chaos and constant change. In this episode, we hear from principals across the state who participated in a recent roundtable with EdSource. They share how they’re coping and what they think would help them and their teachers stay in the profession.

Language, Culture, and Power

As Minnesota’s Black population grows, African Americans and African immigrants unite [Video]

Fred de Sam Lazaro and Sam Lane, PBS Newshour

Qorsho Hassan’s second grade classroom at Echo Park Elementary is a diverse tapestry, students whose families are Native American, Nigerian, Mexican, Pakistani. The school, located in the Twin Cities suburb of Burnsville, is less than 40 percent white. Qorsho Hassan, Teacher: Jackson, how would you describe the word culture?

If the Kids Had Been White, Would Any of This Have Happened?

Karim Doumar, ProPublica

In October 2021, ProPublica published a gutting and outrageous narrative of a juvenile court judge who oversaw a system that jailed children at extraordinary rates, and a county full of officials who collaborated or looked the other way. In one particularly egregious case that reporters Meribah Knight and Ken Armstrong found, several Black children were arrested at school and jailed for a crime that didn’t even exist. Two police officers who were sent to arrest them couldn’t help but wonder: If the kids had been white, would any of this have happened? A lot of readers wondered, too. Counterfactuals like that bring up a point worth flexing some investigative muscle on, even if they are challenging to answer definitively.

Seven Schools in Oakland Are Closing. Here’s Why Students and Parents Are Mad as Hell

Edwin Rios, Mother Jones

On Tuesday night, before Oakland school board members voted to shutter seven schools over the next two years in front of 1,700 Zoom onlookers, dozens of enraged students and parents in the predominantly Black and Latino school district pleaded for the district to halt a plan that would upend the lives of more than 2,700 students and their families. As Oaklandside’s Ashley McBride, who watched the hourslong meeting this week, summed up on Twitter:  Shortly before 1 a.m., the OUSD school board votes to approve a significantly modified resolution to close schools. Two schools, Parker K-8 and Community Day, will close this year. Five more will close next year.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

An 11-year-old girl with Down syndrome was being bullied. So her country’s President walked her to school

Allegra Goodwin, CNN

The President of North Macedonia walked an 11-year-old girl with Down syndrome to school after he heard she was being bullied. President Stevo Pendarovski held Embla Ademi’s hand as he walked her to her elementary school in the city of Gostivar on Monday. Embla has experienced bullying at school due as a result of having Down syndrome — a genetic condition that causes learning disabilities, health problems and distinctive facial characteristics — a spokesperson for the President’s office told CNN.

Homeless youth and children are wildly undercounted, advocates say

Camila Beiner, NPR

Dominique Marshall moved a lot in her youth. She called many different places “home” over short periods of time when she was 17. She learned at a young age that the public school staff and liaisons she grew up around weren’t adequately trained to recognize homeless students. “I wasn’t identified at the school I was at and because of that I didn’t qualify for many services until I went to a shelter,” Marshall, 23, says. “Even then, the liaison in Philadelphia didn’t really have a conversation about what was going on.” The McKinney-Vento Act requires every school district to designate a liaison that identifies homeless students to help them receive needed services. Schools have to immediately enroll children who are homeless even if they don’t have the typical paperwork. The students are also given school uniforms, if they are used, and transportation services.

This 16-year-old wanted to get the COVID vaccine. He had to hide it from his parents [AUDIO]

Morning Edition, NPR

High school junior Nicolas Montero stays busy. He runs track, works night and weekend shifts at Burger King and keeps on top of his schoolwork at Neshaminy High School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. But Montero’s packed schedule is also strategic — he says it’s a way to stay out of the house. Montero and his parents are separated by a political and cultural rift common throughout the U.S.: He says his parents are part of a small but vocal minority who oppose COVID-19 vaccination and have refused to let him get the shots. “The thing about these beliefs is that they alternate by the day,” said Montero, who is 16.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

California’s subsidized preschool program may expand to toddlers

Karen D’Souza, Ed Source

California’s subsidized preschool program may be open to children as young as 2 if the expansion of services in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget comes to pass. The California State Preschool Program currently serves the state’s low-income 3- and 4-year-olds. The new proposal to expand the program to children as young as 2 is part of the K-12 “trailer bill,” clarifying policies related to the state budget for 2022-23. Typically, the governor revises the proposed budget in May and the Legislature is required to approve it by June. Currently, California, which has almost 3 million children under the age of 5, trails behind other states in terms of access to early education, with only 37% enrolled in transitional kindergarten and the state’s subsidized preschool program, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research, a research organization at Rutgers. That’s why childhood advocates see this proposal as a big step forward.

Free community college provision scrapped: What will it mean for low-income and minority students? [AUDIO]

Here & Now, WBUR

Earlier this week, Jill Biden explained at a summit for community college leaders that a free community college provision would no longer be included in the administration’s Build Back Better plan. Host Celeste Headlee speaks with Yolanda Watson Spiva, president of the non-profit Complete College America, and Adrian Bell, a recent graduate of the College of Southern Nevada, a public community college, about the loss of the provision and efforts to make college more accessible to low-income and minority students.

Report: College Equity Gaps for LA’s Black and Latinx Students

Rebecca Kelliher, Diverse Issues in Higher Education

A new report reveals how the pandemic’s unequal toll on Black and Latinx students in Los Angeles threatens to undo years of California’s progress to better support such students into and through college at the same rates as their white peers. The Campaign for College Opportunity, a nonprofit dedicated to higher education equity in California, released the report titled, “The State of Higher Education for Latinx and Black Angelenos.” California is home to the nation’s largest Latinx population and fifth largest Black population.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Budgeting Justice

Celina Su, Boston Review

During the summer of 2020, protestors demanded that George Floyd’s, Breonna Taylor’s, and too many others’ murderers be charged and convicted. They also demanded that cities nationwide defund the police. The Black Lives Matter uprisings provoked intense conversations regarding systemic racism in U.S. policing and foregrounded the need for institutional reforms. In the year since, responses have been woefully inadequate. Though Derek Chauvin was found guilty of killing Floyd, the prosecution’s case hardly mentioned race. Beyond his conviction, cities around the country issued apology statements for institutionalized racism—acknowledging the role of urban planners in redlining and the disinvestment of Black communities—and formed commissions for racial justice. But the results have been disappointing. The Philadelphia commission on Pathways to Reform, Transformation, and Reconciliation, for instance, only launched economic programs aimed at Black small business owners, not wage workers, freelancers, and the unemployed.

Pandemic challenging disabled students, their families and their schools [Audio]

Sarah Gelbard, MPR News

Twelve-year-old Levi Scholen loved school. There were classmates to hang out with and a cooking group he enjoyed, along with the speech, physical and occupational therapy sessions that helped him manage his cerebral palsy. When COVID-19 hit, all of that was lost. To bridge the gap, Centennial Middle School sent home physical therapy equipment and worksheets. Aides helped connect Levi to a virtual social group, although online life wasn’t the same as being there.

Why Socialism? [1949]

Albert Einstein, Monthly Review

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Reading in 2022 [Video]

Levar Burton, The Daily Show

With all these book bans, Levar Burton’s life just got a lot more difficult.

Civic Equity for Students With Disabilities

Leah Bueso, Teachers College Record

Civic education scholars routinely posit that schools should prepare all students to be informed and effective participants in democratic life. To do otherwise would mean allowing “some votes and voices [to] count more or less than others,” which contradicts the very ideals on which democracy is founded. And yet, in the pursuit of equal opportunity, the field of civic education has largely ignored a significant segment of the school population: students with disabilities (SWD). Indeed, in 2002, when Sherrod and colleagues laid the groundwork for conceptualizing citizenship development inclusive of diverse youth, there was no mention of SWD. Even more current civic education research that acknowledges disability as one example of diversity still fails to consider what full inclusion for these students might look like.

Why ‘Delete Spotify’ should not be the main lesson for digital civics education

Antero Garcia and Philip Nichols, Ed Source

Spotify, the audio streaming platform, recently came under fire for its role in circulating vaccine-related misinformation on one of its high-profile podcasts. Public calls to “Delete Spotify” marked the latest in a string of similar exoduses from popular social media services – for instance, over Facebook’s failure to regulate conspiracy theories or Twitter’s reluctance to ban Donald Trump for his incendiary tweets. Such departures offer powerful opportunities for engaging students in critical conversations about technology, democracy and civic life. Unfortunately, they also spotlight the inadequacies of how we commonly approach digital citizenship education.

Other News of Note

Radicalism or pragmatism? A look at another divide in racial justice advocacy

Stephen Menedian, Othering and Belonging Institute

Today we launched the “Structural Racism Remedies Project,” a vast repository of scholarship, advocacy, and policy ideas for interventions to dismantle structural and systemic racism.  The policies contained in this repository take many forms and shapes. Some are locally-focused, while others are national. Some take the form of new initiatives, while others are proposed reforms of existing programs. And some are race-targeted, while others are more universal.

Many of the policies complement and build off each other, but at times they are pitted against each other, as advocates argue for one approach over another. But there is another notable divide evident not only in the underlying literature, but in the public debates over these policies, often grounded in ideological differences.