Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Black History Month centennial channels angst over anti-DEI climate into education, free resources

Terry Tang, AP News

For academics, historians and activists, the past year has been tumultuous in advocating the teaching of Black history in the United States. Despite last year proclaiming February as National Black History Month, President Donald Trump started his second term by claiming some African American history lessons are meant to indoctrinate people into hating the country. The administration has dismantled Black history at national parks, most recently removing an exhibit on slavery in Philadelphia last month. Black history advocates see these acts and their chilling effect as scary and unprecedented. “States and cities are nervous about retribution from the White House,” said DeRay Mckesson, a longtime activist and executive director of Campaign Zero, an organization focused on police reform. “So even the good people are just quieter now.”

California faces teacher strikes across state for better pay and work conditions

Dani Anguiano, The Guardian

California is facing the prospect of massive teacher strikes across the state as conflicts over working conditions, pay and special education staffing reach a boiling point. The strikes, which could begin as soon as next week, have been approved by thousands of educators – affecting schools in some of the state’s largest districts including San Francisco, San Diego and Los Angeles. In San Francisco, 97.6% of teachers voted in favor of a strike, setting the stage for the first such action in the city in nearly 50 years. Teachers in Los Angeles, where the LA unified school district is considering layoffs to address its budget woes, authorized their union to move ahead with a strike. Meanwhile, San Diego educators are preparing for their first walkout in 30 years, while five unions around Sacramento have said they are ready to strike if necessary.

Education under Trump

Lois Weiner, New Politics

“It’s been hell.… It’s just everything and all of it. Every time we turn around,” one experienced education worker and activist wrote me in late fall. Trump’s stunningly comprehensive ideological, cultural, social, political, and economic offensive has made education workers reel. Much work with students continues as before, while the world is turned upside down outside school walls and classrooms. Teachers worry about speaking truth in their classrooms; protecting their kids from deportations; predicting how federal cuts in funding will affect their schools, students, and jobs, as school districts cope with the financial turbulence of funding revoked, restored, or in limbo because of court orders and what seems Trump’s whim. From his first days in office Trump showed his authoritarian aims, having won support from the mega-wealthy. They either admired or turned a blind eye to MAGA (Christian nationalist, White supremacist, nativist, patriarchal, homophobic, ableist) and to Trump, who used every governmental power he could to promulgate policies to expand his power and undercut human rights.

Language, Culture, and Power

In Under 500 Words, a Judge Weaponized Wit to Free the Child Detained by ICE

A.O. Scott, New York Times

One of the many unsettling images to emerge from the recent ICE surge in Minneapolis was that of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, in his blue bunny hat, standing in the January cold with the hand of a federal officer gripping his Spider-Man backpack. Liam and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, an asylum seeker from Ecuador, were taken from Minnesota to Texas and held at a detention facility outside San Antonio. Lawyers working on their behalf filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, an ancient judicial principle forbidding the government from holding anyone in custody without providing a legally tenable reason for doing so. On Saturday, Fred Biery, a federal judge in Texas’ Western District, granted their petition, freeing them.

Immigration enforcement gets closer and closer to schools. The effects are wide-reaching.

Lily Altavena, Chalkbeat

Penny Chavez has been watching immigration enforcement activity in Minneapolis with increasing panic, seeing public school students like her two grandchildren being detained.

Rumors are swirling that her town, Springfield, Ohio, could be the next target for a surge of activity from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in part because of its Haitian community. Chavez and her two grandchildren, ages 5 and 4, are U.S. citizens, but she’s still fearful that they will be detained at or near their schools because they are Hispanic. Chavez has pressed Springfield’s school district for answers around how school leaders would react if agents were to enter a district school, but she hasn’t been reassured by their answers. For parents without legal status whose kids are enrolled in the district, a lack of clarity makes them reluctant to send their children to school, she said. “They have the right to know whether or not it’s safe to pick the kids up or drop them off,” she said.

‘We want a change to happen.’ L.A. County students walk out over ICE raids

Jaweed Kaleem, Kate Sequeira, Christopher Buchanan and Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times

A different kind of bell sounded on Friday at many Southern California campuses — a call that beckoned students to walk out of school instead of into their next class as thousands joined protests in a national tide of demonstrations against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Across many school districts — from Long Beach to Los Angeles to Pasadena — throngs of students skipped school or poured out of classrooms and cafeterias, joining cafe owners who had shut down for the day, parents who took time off from work to rally, and activists who have been marching for months. Walkouts — organized and sporadic — also took place at UCLA, USC and Cal State L.A. For many students, the immigration raids have been personal, affecting family or friends who are undocumented. They have felt fear in their neighborhoods since mass detentions began in June — and were moved to act after recent violence in Minneapolis. Others said they were motivated to take classroom civics lessons to the streets.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

How the Trump Administration’s Embrace of Oil, Gas, and Chemical Industry Interests Will 

Endanger Children’s Health

Cathleen Kelly, Jill Rosenthal, Jasia Smith, Center for American Progress

America’s future is directly tied to the health and well-being of its children. Yet a July 2025 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reveals a worrying decline in U.S. children’s health over the past two decades. Researchers link this trend to a range of factors, including environmental toxins and climate change, along with unhealthy food, poverty, stress, and other mental health challenges as well as limited access to preventive health care. These conditions can trigger acute and chronic health problems, especially for children. The JAMA study found that by 2023, a child in the United States was 15 to 20 percent more likely to develop a chronic condition than they were in 2011—including neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism, behavioral problems, developmental delays, and ADHD

Long COVID affects millions of children. The largest pediatric trial so far launches this year.

Simon Spichak, The 19th

Justin Lin’s daughter, Serena, developed long COVID in seventh grade. For more than three years, she has experienced postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome — causing rapid heartbeat, dizziness, and cognitive dysfunction as well as post-exertional malaise. The latter causes debilitating crashes after minimal physical, cognitive, or emotional exertion, which forced her to switch to online school. With no approved pediatric treatments, Lin wonders whether Serena will be able to attend college. As a community representative for the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s long COVID clinical trials initiative, called RECOVER-Treating long COVID, Lin is providing input for the largest pediatric long COVID trial to date. He hopes the trial will inspire more large-scale, well-designed studies for kids. “I think about long COVID and its impact on society,” Lin said. “Helping the kids could be one of the highest-leverage things you can do.”

Research Finds Interaction With Father, Not Mother, Affects Child Health

Ellen Barry, New York Times

For much of the 20th century and beyond, social scientists attributed a range of chronic mental health problems to dysfunction between infants and their mothers, who were categorized as overbearing, rejecting, domineering or ambivalent. But a team of researchers from Pennsylvania State University has found that at times the early parenting behavior of fathers may have a greater impact on children’s health. For a study published recently in the journal Health Psychology, the scientists observed three-way interactions between 10-month-old infants, their fathers and their mothers, and then checked in on the families when the children were 2 and 7.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Trump’s War on Child Care

Naomi Bethune and Emma Janssen, American Prospect

On January 5, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would lead to the revocation of multiple child care rules featured in the 2024 Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF). Under the Biden administration, changes were made to the decades-old CCDF to help working families afford and access quality child care, while also improving payment methods for child care providers. Enrolling one’s children in a child care program can be expensive, particularly in areas that already have a high cost of living. As of 2024, U.S. families spend anywhere between $6,552 and $15,600 per year on full-day care for one child. Consequently, the CCDF has long attempted to lessen this burden, with the recent Biden-era regulatory moves changing the assistance that providers and families receive.

Trump’s War on Higher Ed Is an Attack on Women

Monica Potts, The New Republic

In 2024, The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank responsible for Project 2025 and so many guiding principles for President Donald Trump’s second term, published a white paper bemoaning the low birth rate among married women in the United States. It blamed a surprising culprit: higher education and federal policies that support students, such as subsidized loans. “If the government provides excessively generous subsidies for higher education, women and men are being artificially pushed away from work and into more years in school because they do not want to leave those tax dollars on the table,” argued the paper’s authors, Jay Greene and Lindsey Burke. Pursuing college meant that young people delayed marriage and starting a family, and, for women especially, that meant a decrease in fertility overall.

Texas A&M University cancels programs in women’s and gender studies

Elissa Nadworny, NPR

Texas A&M University on Friday announced it is ending its programs in women’s and gender studies as part of a broader effort to eliminate teaching related to diversity, equity and inclusion. The university said it had also modified hundreds of courses and canceled six to comply with a policy adopted last November that prohibits, without approval from the campus president, teaching that “will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

MSU must return what they took — and add more

Rema Vassar, Bridge Michigan

On January 21, the Trump administration dropped its legal appeal of a federal court ruling that found its anti-DEI guidance unconstitutional. The legal uncertainty that universities claimed justified their actions for the systemic dismantling of equity programs? Gone. The pending litigation they pointed to as requiring caution? Abandoned. The federal threat they used to justify cuts? Ruled unconstitutional. There is now zero legal justification—not even the pretense of pending litigation—for Michigan State University’s actions. Yet MSU continues operating as if the Trump administration’s unconstitutional orders carry force of law. It’s time for MSU to reinstate everything it destroyed. And then do more.

Two School Districts Sue, Claiming Alaska Is Failing Its Constitutional Obligation to Fund Public Education

Emily Schwing, ProPublica

Two Alaska school districts filed a lawsuit on Jan. 20 in Anchorage Superior Court against the state, its governor and its education commissioner over what they say is a long-running failure to adequately fund public education. In the complaint, the Kuspuk School District and the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District argue “the state is failing to meet its constitutional obligation” to provide Alaska students “a sound basic education and meaningful opportunity for proficiency” in vital subjects, and to fund schools and school districts sufficiently to do that. The plaintiffs are seeking to force the state to fulfill its constitutional obligation and requesting a court-ordered study to determine what it costs to educate students.

Darfur’s Children Caught Between Collapse and Survival

Maxine Ansah, The Voice of Africa

Children in Sudan’s Darfur region are living on what UNICEF has described as a fragile line between abandonment and hope, as conflict, displacement and the collapse of basic services push families to the edge of survival.Family games Speaking at a press briefing in Geneva, Eva Hinds, Chief of Communication for UNICEF in Sudan, said reaching even one child in Darfur now requires days of negotiation, security clearances and travel across sand roads cut by shifting frontlines. She described the response as critical but precarious, particularly in Tawila, a town in North Darfur where hundreds of thousands of people have fled brutal violence. Hinds said families in Tawila have effectively built an entire city from sticks, hay and plastic sheeting. Every movement by humanitarian teams is hard won, and every delivery remains vulnerable to disruption. Yet despite these conditions, assistance is still reaching children who have had little or no support for months.

Democracy and the Public Interest

No Free Lunch: The Real Costs of the Federal Education Vouchers

NEPC

Money doesn’t grow on trees. But some voucher advocates, including a handful of Democrats, are implying it might—at least metaphorically— for states that opt into the federal Scholarship Tax Credit Program that was part of Republicans’ so-called Big Beautiful Bill (the Reconciliation Act) that Congress approved in July 2025. Under the program, taxpayers can receive 100% federal tax credits of up to $1,700 (if their tax liability extends to $1,700) for donating to nonprofit “scholarship granting organizations” (SGOs). The SGOs then distribute scholarships for private school tuition and for other education-related services such as tutoring or transportation.

Building Pan-African Solidarity: Political Education and Projects of Self-Determination

Karen Marshall, People’s Think Tank

Early in my life, I was introduced to Caribbean authors and organizers. I learned about Walter Rodney and discovered I knew people who participated in the Rodney riots in Jamaica. My

introduction to politics was through learning Caribbean revolutions, African independence

movements and generally issues that grew out of colonization and dispossession. As I got older I discovered the writings of Claudia Jones, Stuart Hall, and Aime Cesaire—all of who sharpened my analysis. I think of myself as a Pan-African Socialist, rooted in the traditions of Franz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Kwame Nkrumah, and Maurice Bishop.

Texas’ social studies shakeup creates divide over whose histories to teach, and how

Jaden Edison, Texas Tribune

Roughly 17 hours into a four-day marathon of meetings, the State Board of Education turned to a discussion of broad historical topics, prompting several board members to present an itemized wish list for Texas’ social studies curriculum. The elected board members began overhauling social studies last year, with final decisions due by summer. But several of the five Democrats on the 15-member board began diving into the minutiae during Thursday’s meeting, fearing they may not have a better opportunity in the future. 

Other News of Note

Editor’s Note: With profound sadness, we share the news that Ernest Morrell (1971-2026) passed away this week.  

Fighting for Literacy Across America [Video]

Ernest Morrell, Youtube

Teaching English at Oakland High in the late 1990s, Ernest Morrell faced the age-old problem of how to get modern students interested in a canon of long-dead writers and poets. He watched kids muddle through class, heads down, interest limited. Then one day, while teaching Beowulf, a student’s eyes lit up when he realized the story was similar to a popular rap song. That day, Professor Morrell saw a spark of joy, enthusiasm and engagement and wondered how he could give that spark to all his students. He started bringing in other contemporary tangents – pop culture references, movies, music – but without losing the basis in classic literature. His students were learning. They were engaged. And, most importantly, Professor Morrell says, they were learning to love school and love themselves. Since then, Professor Morrell has authored K-5 and 6-12 curricula which are being taught by schools in every state. He’s advocated for teaching that not only improves academic outcomes, but also personal and social ones. And he’s teaching Notre Dame undergraduates and ACE students to find that spark in their lives and the lives of those around them.

National Council of Teachers of English Presidential Address, 2014 [Video]

Ernest Morrell, Youtube