Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Trump’s Reign of Terror on Schools—and How We Fight Back

Eve L. Ewing, In These Times

The new presidential administration is enacting an education agenda the same way it is doing everything else: in a blitzkrieg, implementing sweeping measures as hastily as possible with little regard to their legality or feasibility. This rapid-fire assault — on trans youth who need gender-affirming care, on teachers who convey the basic facts of American history, on Head Start educators who need to make payroll—has a devastating material impact on countless individuals’ ability to teach, learn and feel safe in schools. Beyond these tangible consequences, the hailstorm of actions has a broader effect. The vitriol leaves us on our back foot, always and only reactive at best and immobilized at worst. We find ourselves arguing.

Parenting In the Age of Trump

Elie Mystal, The Nation

It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day atrocities committed by the Trump administration. Every hour brings a new crisis, every day something precious or useful gets smashed. That’s on purpose. The torrent of Trump lawlessness is designed to keep us forever focused on what’s happening right now, constantly defending ourselves against the latest unhinged pronouncement.  I would have fallen deep into this myopic trap these past two weeks, but there has been one thing keeping me focused on the long horizon: my children. I have two boys, ages 12 and 9. Every day I look at them, I am forced to contemplate the future—to worry about the future Trump is stealing from them, and the terrible suffering that awaits them in the world Trump seeks to create.

Why Trump’s Plan to Kill the Education Department May Fail

Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine

It’s easy to look at the Trump administration’s early rampage through the federal bureaucracy and see an unstoppable steamroller. The Office of Management and Budget, often called the nerve center of the federal government, has been fully MAGA-ized to the extent that its temporary director felt empowered to place a freeze on a vast swath of federal spending, even without consulting the White House. Then there’s the powerful if obscure Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, which together supervise federal employees and federally owned buildings. They’ve both been invaded and occupied by Elon Musk’s Geek Kiddie Corps of DOGE operatives, who seem to be in charge of a vast array of sensitive data and are getting rid of career employees who get in their way. And most spectacularly, the administration has moved on several fronts to completely gut the U.S. Agency for International Development as a symbol of the foreign aid that America First activists hate like sin itself.

Language, Culture, and Power

Hoping to “Trump Proof” Students’ Civil Rights, Illinois Lawmakers Aim to End Police Ticketing at School

Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica

Citing an urgency to protect students’ civil rights in a second Trump administration, Illinois lawmakers filed a new bill Monday that would explicitly prevent school police from ticketing and fining students for misbehavior. The legislation for the first time also would require districts to track police activity at schools and disclose it to the state — data collection made more pressing as federal authorities have signaled they will deemphasize their role in civil rights enforcement. A 2022 ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation, “The Price Kids Pay,” found that even though Illinois law bans school officials from fining students directly, districts skirt the law by calling on police to issue citations for violating local ordinances. It also found that Black students were twice as likely to be ticketed at school than their white peers.

Review of The Succeeders: How Immigrant Youth Are Transforming What It Means to Belong in America, by Andrea Flores

Antonio Vásquez, Education Review

Anthropologist Andrea Flores’s first book, The Succeeders:  How Immigrant Youth Are Transforming What It Means to Belong in America, offers a qualitative study on the value of education for present and future generations of Latinos living in the United States, as experienced and envisioned by high school youth in and around Nashville, Tennessee. The youth, who the author describes as the Succeeders, were all participants in a nonprofit college access program. “Mostly from low-income Mexican and Central American families,” they were on the cusp of becoming the first in their families to both graduate from high school and consider college in their immediate futures.

‘We have their back’: Boyle Heights network mobilizes to support immigrant families

Andrew Lopez, Boyle Heights Beat

Raquel Roman remembers the lingering feeling of tension in Boyle Heights at the beginning of President Trump’s first term during a heightened threat of deportations. A flood of panicked messages hit group chats as people shared photos of white U.S. Homeland Security trucks parked in Boyle Heights. “Who are they? Where are they going?” Roman recalls reading in some of the messages. At times, the federal agents were just stopping for lunch. Roman, the executive director of Proyecto Pastoral, a community-building and social justice nonprofit, said she and her team saw the immediate need for a local rapid response team, a network of people to prove or disprove immigration enforcement activity.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

The Joys and Challenges of School Counseling

Ana Báez, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction

As a school counselor, I want to share a glimpse into what makes this role so meaningful, along with the challenges we face and how we can better work together to support our students. The best part of being a school counselor is building authentic relationships with students and empowering them to discover their potential. Whether it’s helping them plan for their future, overcome personal obstacles, or simply offering a safe space to talk, I love seeing students grow in confidence and self-awareness. I love witnessing the transformation of students over time. Many arrive feeling unsure or overwhelmed, but develop the tools to advocate for themselves, make informed decisions, and realize their potential. I remember meeting a shy 9th grader who entered school without speaking any English who then graduated as valedictorian and delivered their speech in English. Our students’ growth highlights the resilience and determination of students when we can give them the right support and encouragement.

Integrating K–12 Teachers into Climate Education

Michael Hamburger and J. Adam Scribner, Eos

Anthropogenic climate change is widely recognized by scientists as the preeminent environmental issue of the 21st century [Hansen et al., 2013]. The immense consequences of climate change across virtually every aspect of society have led many scientists to focus on K–12 climate education as part of their “broader impacts” missions. Engaging with K–12 teachers offers researchers extraordinary opportunities to communicate climate science to a wide audience, with far-reaching effects on future generations. Schoolteachers can play an essential role in teaching scientific and climate literacy, promoting critical thinking, inspiring environmental stewardship, and preparing students to find climate solutions. These circumstances underscore a growing opportunity for scientists to work with K–12 educators hungry for knowledge, tools, and resources that allow them to overcome challenges of teaching about climate change and captivate their students with the complex scientific and policy questions surrounding the subject.

‘Halfway normal’: Pasadena Unified schools return, with mental health a big focus

Mariana Dale, LAist

Hugs, high-fives and handmade signs welcomed students and their families back to Pasadena’s Don Benito Elementary School on Wednesday. “You feel the love,” said parent Ravea Miller. “It’s always been love. But you just feel it more [today] because everybody was affected.” The majority of Pasadena schools that shut down during the peak of the Eaton Fire have now reopened. Pasadena Unified staggered reopenings over two weeks, and the final nine campuses welcomed students back Thursday. Unanswered questions remain about rebuilding, how to make up for three weeks of lost in-person schooling and how the fallout from the fires could exacerbate existing financial challenges.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Head Start childcare programs are still unable to access federal money after Trump’s funding freeze

Shannon Pettypiece, NBC News

Dozens of Head Start programs, which provide childcare and preschool education to low-income children, have been unable to access previously approved federal funding, putting some programs at risk of having to close their doors in the coming days, according to a survey by the National Head Start Association. The programs say they haven’t been able to draw down the funds to pay for expenses, like payroll and utilities, since a federal funding freeze was announced in the second week of the Trump administration. The freeze started last week with an Office of Management and Budget memo, which was then quickly rescinded. The White House said Head Start programs shouldn’t have been affected by the freeze, and a judge blocked the action amid a legal challenge to the freeze. Still, more than 45 programs serving 20,000 children in 23 states have faced funding delays, according to the survey. Nationally, Head Start has touted funding to serve over 750,000 children.

College Presidents Are Right to Defy Trump’s War on Higher Education

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, Time

New survey data shows that Notre Dame’s legendary president Father Theodore Hesburgh’s wisdom for college presidents from 55 years ago is still relevant today. “My basic principle is that you don’t make decisions because they are easy; you don’t make them because they are cheap; you don’t make them because they’re popular; you make them because they’re right,” he advised. Our fresh polling data from approximately 100 college and university presidents in attendance at the Yale Higher Education Leadership Summit last week reveals that higher education leaders are no longer cowering as their schools are wrongly exploited as scapegoats for political grandstanding.

The Race-Blind College-Admissions Era Is Off to a Weird Start

Rose Horowitch, The Atlantic

When colleges began announcing the makeup of their incoming freshman classes last year—the first admissions cycle since the Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action—there seemed to have been some kind of mistake. The Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard had been almost universally expected to produce big changes. Elite universities warned of a return to diversity levels not seen since the early 1960s, when their college classes had only a handful of Black students. And yet, when the numbers came in, several of the most selective colleges in the country reported the opposite results. Yale, Dartmouth, Northwestern, the University of Virginia, Wesleyan, Williams, and Bowdoin all ended up enrolling more Black or Latino students, or both. Princeton and Duke appear to have kept their demographics basically stable.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Economists: Ohio school funding cuts would hurt economy, increase inequality

Marty Schladen, Ohio Capital Journal

In a survey released Monday, the overwhelming majority of economists said cuts to public education funding proposed by Republican Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman would dampen the state’s future economic output at the same time that they would increase inequality in an already unequal state. According to the Ohio Supreme Court, the state’s public schools have been chronically underfunded. Over the past several years, the Ohio General Assembly has attempted to address the problem through the Cupp-Patterson plan passed as part of the state budget. Because it was included in the state budget, it wasn’t fully funded, so full implementation will only come if lawmakers approve the third and final phase of funding in the two-year state budget due July 1. But fresh off championing nearly $1 billion in new money for families sending their kids to private and religious schools last year as Senate president, Huffman last month said Ohio’s public school funding was “unsustainable.”

A school district’s plan for rising rent and stagnant salaries: Teacher housing

Alexis Wray, The 19th

In the most expensive city in North Carolina, affordable housing can be hard to find — and teachers are especially hard hit. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) is responding with a three-part plan to ensure district educators can make themselves at home. The district launched the “At Home in CMS” initiative to retain and gain more teachers as it faced nearly 300 vacancies in 2024 throughout district schools. The program will offer apartments at below-rate rent, homeownership opportunities for teachers and eventually build its own housing development. CMS joins other school systems around the country grappling with rising housing costs and stagnant educator salaries.

Maui’s post-wildfire housing crisis offers a warning for Los Angeles

Jack Ross, Capital and Main

It wasn’t the images of flames ripping through neighborhoods in Pacific Palisades and Altadena this month that really triggered Jordan Hocker’s anxiety. It was the flood of social media posts about rent-gouging in nearby Los Angeles County communities that appeared in the days that followed. Hocker lived on Maui when wildfires destroyed as many as 4,000 housing units in August 2023, leveling the town of Lahaina. But as an organizer with the Maui Housing Hui, a tenant advocacy group, she has been dealing with the ensuing rental crisis ever since.

Democracy and the Public Interest

These Minnesota teachers found ways for students to talk politics in class

Mara Klecker, Minnesota Star Tribune

Sixth-grade U.S. history teacher Andrew Waller flashed a photo of a slice of pizza covered in pineapple chunks onto the screen. The class of preteens blurted-out opinions of the controversial pizza topping. Waller quieted the room and launched a conversation about respectful disagreement among the preteen Chaska Middle School East students. “We’re going to talk about issues like immigration, the role of government and what presidents should or should not do,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but adults argue about this stuff all the time … so we need to come up with some rules.”

Education Officials Placed on Leave in Trump’s Sprawling Effort to Curb D.E.I.

Erica L. Green and Zach Montague, New York Times

The Education Department placed a number of employees across its offices on administrative leave on Friday, part of a wave of what staff members and union representatives say are dozens of suspensions at the agency in the Trump administration’s purge of diversity efforts. In letters obtained by The New York Times, the department notified affected employees that they would lose access to their email accounts, but would continue to receive pay for an indefinite period.

The department cited guidance from the Office of Personnel Management, which had directed agencies to submit plans for shedding staff associated with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts by the end of the day on Friday.

Conservatives Have Big Plans for D.C. Public Schools

Hassan Ali Kanu, The American Prospect

The push to replace existing public school systems with government-subsidized private and religious schools suffered a major blow on Election Day 2024, as voters rejected ballot measures to implement universal voucher schemes in Kentucky, Nebraska, and Colorado. Those votes offered more data that universal voucher proposals lack popular support, even among the same populations and demographics that voted for a Republican president and for a right-wing Republican majority in both chambers of Congress. Still, the “school choice,” or voucher, movement, which has been steered for several decades by a handful of ultraconservative billionaires, is in the midst of a watershed moment, buoyed by the aftereffects of a global pandemic and the so-called culture wars attendant to the rise of Trumpism.

Other News of Note

Black Educators as Movement Leaders

Noah Nelson, Black Perspectives

Throughout the history of Black struggle and the social movements it has fueled, education and the transmission of knowledge have been central to advancing sociopolitical change. In this context, community organizers have long viewed education as a political battleground, embedding it as a foundational element within movement-building strategies. For example, initiatives like freedom schools, revolutionary institutions such as the Oakland Community School, and Pan-Africanist schools during the Black Power movement all placed education at the core of the Black liberation struggle. Moreover, in today’s ongoing fights against capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism, it’s essential to remember the ways of teaching as a core pillar of community organizing.