Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Ukrainian school children get lessons on how to survive an invasion as Russian threat looms large [Video]

Li Cohen, CBS News

Fear of a full-scale Russian military invasion is looming large in the city of Kharkiv, just 25 miles from Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia. Children are still going to school as residents try to get on with their daily lives, but as the Reuters news agency reports, some kids are now learning how to survive a military attack, along with math and spelling. Reuters visited a school in Kharkiv where students were getting lessons on how to identify various explosives and the importance of bulletproof vests and helmets. They were also practicing evacuation drills and learning first aid. Civilian defense specialist Oleksandr Shevchuk told Reuters the lessons have been popular in the region. In January, students in the capital of Kyiv received a similar lesson after a series of hoax bomb alerts across the country.

Education and the Path to One Nation, Indivisible

Linda Darling-Hammond, Learning Policy Institute

In 1968, the Kerner Commission Report concluded that the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Without major social changes, the Commission warned, the U.S. faced a “system of apartheid” in its major cities. Today, 50 years after the report was issued, that prediction characterizes most of our large urban areas, where intensifying segregation and concentrated poverty have collided with disparities in school funding to reinforce educational inequality. While racial achievement gaps in education have remained stubbornly large, segregation has been increasing steadily, creating a growing number of apartheid schools that serve almost exclusively students of color from low-income families.

Cardona: Creating environments where teachers can thrive is key to keeping good educators

Samantha West, Chalkbeat

When MaKenzie Mosby reflects on the four years she taught seventh-grade math, her feelings are mixed. She loved her students, families, fellow teachers and staff at her Memphis charter school — and still does. But from the start of her career, even before the pandemic upended education, it became increasingly clear to Mosby that, for her, the profession wouldn’t be sustainable. This is not only a problem in Memphis. Retaining teachers like Mosby and the thousands of other exhausted professionals across the nation who have left the education field was top of mind for U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and the approximately 4,000 school leaders and industry professionals who discussed solutions at the School Superintendents Association’s National Conference on Education Thursday and Friday in Nashville.

Language, Culture, and Power

Why Is ICE Still Detaining Abigail Hernandez?

James Goodman, The Progressive

When Joe Biden was elected President, Abigail Hernandez expressed hope that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would release her from endless detention in upstate New York and drop efforts to deport her as an undocumented immigrant. In a post-election letter to one of her supporters, she cheered on “Joe” with a “Yeah,” saying she believed he would “fix the immigration.” But that has not happened. This month marks the fourth year that Hernandez, who is twenty-five, has spent in detention because ICE won’t let her out of its clutches. A year ago, the agency  deepened Hernandez’s sense of isolation by transferring her to upstate New York’s Rensselaer County Jail—about 230 miles from her friends and family in Rochester.

Teaching Black History Month made harder by new legislation limiting schools, educators [AUDIO]

Anya Steinberg, WBUR

In the past year, more than 35 states have introduced over 150 bills limiting what schools can teach about race. For many educators in those states, it’s made teaching Black History Month fraught.

From book bans to ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, LGBTQ kids feel ‘erased’ in the classroom

Matt Lavietes, NBC News

Students have repeatedly vandalized Pride posters at Spencer Lyst’s high school in Williamson County, Tennessee. Teachers have skipped over LGBTQ issues in class textbooks. Trans kids in his state have been legally barred from competing on school sports teams that align with their gender identity. Parents have called on school officials to remove books about sexual orientation and gender identity from the county’s elementary curriculum. And while leading his school’s Pride club at a September homecoming parade, Lyst and other LGBTQ students were booed by a group of parents.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

COVID-19 pandemic poses unique challenges for students who are homeless

Alexandra E. Pavlakis, The Conversation

Before the pandemic hit in March 2020, Faith – a single mother with two children, one in third grade and one in fifth grade – worked at a sports stadium in Houston. Her focus at the time was “paying for a room and trying to pay for child care,” she stated during an interview. But after the pandemic began, the stadium canceled games and Faith found herself out of work. Not long afterward, she and her children were evicted. “When they’re cutting hours and … work’s getting shut down … nobody making no money,” Faith, a young African American mother who did not finish high school, said during an interview held at a large and secure family shelter for the homeless. Faith – that name is a pseudonym to protect her privacy – spoke with my research team for a study designed to better understand student homelessness during the pandemic.

The Student Mental Health Pandemic

NEPC Newsletter

COVID-related school closures and remote instruction, which have disproportionately impacted students of color, have raised high-profile concerns about increased gaps in opportunities to learn. But in a recent speech, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona highlighted a different

kind of concern, about anxiety, depression, and other types and manifestations of mental

Illness. “Our schools must offer increased access to mental health supports for students, wraparound programs, meaningful and authentic parent and family engagement, and interventions for those students who felt the impact of the pandemic more bluntly than others,” he said.

Restorative Justice Does More Than Solve Conflict. It Helps Build Classroom Community.

Helen Thomas, EdSurge

It’s a dry, hot day in south Phoenix, but my dimly lit classroom is cool and comfortable. Quick footsteps approach outside the door and two-dozen 8- and 9-year-olds return from recess, sweating and smiling. They calmly walk to their desks while a children’s mindful breathing video plays on the whiteboard. Some students quietly grab their water bottles and head out to fill them up, and others sit on the carpet and stretch. While this happens, I watch four students pass by their desks and head straight to the table in the corner of the room to sit in a small circle. Maria is speaking about an interaction at recess that left her feeling excluded.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Why Are Colleges Hesitant to Train More Early Childhood Educators?

Rebecca Koenig, EdSurge

As consensus builds among many researchers, policy experts and elected officials that the U.S. should prioritize early childhood education, a key component of that agenda is getting more people trained to offer high-quality care and teaching to young kids. And that means encouraging colleges to recruit, prepare and graduate more early childhood educators. But there’s a hitch: Some higher ed leaders are ambivalent about promoting pathways to jobs in early learning.

The Education Department will wipe out loans for students defrauded by DeVry University

Stacy Cowley, New York Times

The Education Department will cancel federal student loans for at least 1,800 students who attended DeVry University, once one of the nation’s largest for-profit college chains, because it fraudulently lured in applicants for years with vastly inflated claims about their career prospects. While the department has stepped up its discharges of debts for students who were victimized by their schools, the decision announced on Wednesday is its first approval of fraud claims involving a school that is still operating. The claims approved on Wednesday are just the start, officials said. They want other students who attended DeVry during the time it was making its false promises to apply for relief.

Gig by gig at California community colleges [AUDIO]

Education Beat Podcast

California’s community colleges increasingly rely on adjunct professors as low-paid replacements for full-time faculty. Rather than a side gig, many adjuncts cobble together part-time work at multiple colleges or in multiple districts. Many don’t have health insurance. Often they are hanging on, hoping for a full time job, that never materializes. It can be a precarious living, one that shortchanges the adjuncts and their students.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Interest in district-subsidized teacher housing in California intensifies

John Fensterwald, Ed Source

Next month, 122 teachers and other employees in the Jefferson Union High School District in Daly City will learn if they won a drawing that will allow them to move into a new housing project with below-market rents that their district is building. Nicole Ann Polo hopes to be one of them. A math teacher at her alma mater, Westmoor High, Polo has been living with her parents, which makes her better off, she said, than colleagues who moonlight delivering DoorDash or commute 90 minutes each way from the East Bay.

The Bold New Campaign to “End Poverty in California”

Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation

This month, former Stockton, Calif., Mayor Michael Tubbs launched a campaign as bold as it is straightforward: End Poverty in California. The campaign shares its name with a movement led by Upton Sinclair during his 1934 run for California governor. In his novel The Jungle, Sinclair observed: “The rich people not only had all the money, they had all the chance to get more; they had all the knowledge and the power, and so the poor man was down, and he had to stay down.”

This dynamic persists to this day. Tubbs, who grew up in poverty before becoming Stockton’s mayor at just 26, calls it “the setup.” The “setup” traps people in poverty by design, through “separate and unequal schools, lack of health care infrastructure, no good jobs, prohibitively expensive higher education, over-policing” and much more.

Most Black Americans say they can meet basic needs financially, but many still experience economic insecurity

Khadijah Edwards, Pew Research

Most Black adults say their household finances meet basic needs with either a little or a lot left over for extras, even amid economic disruptions due to COVID-19. Yet financial challenges exist. Fewer than half of Black adults say they have an emergency fund, and some have taken multiple jobs to make ends meet, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey of Black Americans. The survey also finds that Black Americans typically experience higher levels of economic insecurity than Americans overall. This insecurity has worsened during the coronavirus pandemic amid health and financial challenges, which include a relatively high unemployment rate for Black workers.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Texas: Pastors Fight for Public Schools Against Heartless Privatizers

Diane Ravitch, Diane Ravitch’s Blog

The well-organized Pastors for Texas Children is engaged in rhetorical battles with the well-funded privatizers. Whether by Tweet, in the media, or on the lecture platform, Pastor Charles Foster Johnson and his colleagues lead the battle on behalf of public schools, taking on the rich and powerful and their political lackeys. After Congressman Chip Roy attacked Pastors for Texas children and classroom teachers on Twitter, Pastor Johnson responded forcefully: On Twitter, the group responded to Congressman Roy: “Congressman @chiproytx, your repeated lies about our [public school] teachers & the pastors who support them, are shameful, embarrassing, and shockingly immoral. You may mock them and us with your political lies against these servants. But you cannot mock God.”

Our schools must tell a better and more complete story about our growing economic inequality

Karen Hansen and Nazli Kibria, Hechinger Report

ince the end of the Great Recession, the U.S. economy has experienced tremendous growth. However, as the economy has grown, so has economic inequality, increasing dramatically across the country. The average income of the nation’s top 10 percent of earners is now more than nine times higher than the average income of the bottom 90 percent. The pandemic is exacerbating the trend: Over the past two years, billionaires’ wealth increased more than ever before, a report by Oxfam International found. And an estimated 160 million people were pushed into poverty. This growing economic inequality is also widening educational achievement gaps and causing many young people to have a lack of empathy and understanding for those outside their socioeconomic peer groups.

Ron DeSantis Wants to Seize Millions from Pro-Masking Schools

Abigail Wienberg, Mother Jones

Ron DeSantis is taking his war on masks to a new—and possibly unconstitutional—level. Last year, Florida’s Republican governor issued an executive order banning mask mandates in schools. Now, he’s backing a proposal to withhold $200 million in education funds from 12 counties that kept requiring masks, and divert their money to 55 school districts that complied. The proposal, part of a Florida House of Representatives budget bill sponsored by casino-mogul-turned GOP state legislator Randy Fine, is pegged to the salaries of staff making over $100,000 in the targeted districts, although it wouldn’t directly slash those administrators’ salaries.

Other News of Note

The Best Way to Fight for the Public is in Public

Robin Wonsley Worlobah, In These Times

I was elected to represent the beautiful, diverse working class communities of Minneapolis’ Ward 2 as the city’s first ever Black democratic socialist City Councilmember. My election was part of a wave of courageous campaigns from the growing left-wing movement across the country, including the election of two other democratic socialists to the Minneapolis City Council. I ran as an independent socialist outside the Democratic Party in what has essentially been a one-party town for decades. I am an independent socialist because Black liberation has only advanced through mass working class struggle and not a few individuals maintaining proximity to power.

Paul Robeson–The Revolutionary

Tony Pecinovsky, Black Perspectives

It was reported in his New York Times obituary that Paul Robeson became a “virtual recluse” by the time of his death on January 23, 1976. He was living in his sister’s home in a working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia, completely retired from public life. From a pinnacle of roughly $100,000 per year in the early-1940s, Robeson’s income had dwindled by the mid-1950s to a few thousand dollars, largely a consequence of his U.S. passport being revoked. Though his finances rebounded some by the 1960s, Robeson never regained the domestic celebrity status he once enjoyed.This African American History Month we should analyze the context of Robeson’s forced marginalization, as well as the marginalization of the Communist-led left. The two are interconnected.