Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

The Far Right’s Plan to Force Teachers to Lie About Race

Jesse Hagopian, The Nation

It was a warm night in the Dallas–Fort Worth area on June 3, 2020, and Colleyville Heritage High School principal James Whitfield could not sleep. But it wasn’t the heat that tormented him. Wracked by the recent murder of George Floyd, Whitfield found himself entangled in a maelstrom of emotions and knew he had to address the tumultuous times with his school community. Whitfield, a Black educator of two decades, had served in the Dallas, Texas, area as a classroom teacher, assistant principal, and principal at the middle and high school levels.

Schoolhouse Crock

Jennifer C. Berkshire, The Baffler

Linda McMahon will “empower the next Generation of American Students and Workers, and make America Number One in Education in the World,” Donald Trump recently effused about his nominee for secretary of education. Although Trump himself has promised to dismantle the Department of Education, not much is known about the education positions of McMahon, whose claim to fame is having presided over the WWE—World Wrestling Entertainment. Yet within the contours of the emerging Trump administration a clear vision for the nation’s schools is emerging, and it looks a lot like the past.

“Starcups Workers Unite!” — Students Learn Their Workplace Rights

Nicolle Fefferman, Rethinking Schools

Students put on their props — ties, union stickers, lanyards, name tags. The room was full of laughter and last-minute reminders. The town hall meeting was about to begin, and groups were settling in to discuss the unit’s central question: Should the Starcups workers at Store 867 vote to be a union? It was day three at the Los Angeles area Gardena High School in Mr. Martinez’s Law and Society class. Jazmin Rivera and Emely Rauda from the UCLA Labor Center and I had worked with students to prepare them for a simulation of a National Labor Relations Board union election based on the Starbucks Workers United organizing over the last few years.

Language, Culture, and Power

With each breath, we inhale someone else’s yesterdays

Antero Garcia, La Cuenta

As I write this the air around me is poison. A devastating mixture of toxins, debris, and ash fills my lungs right now. With each breath, I inhale particles of my neighbors’ homes, lives, memories. I’m breathing in a Los Angeles that no longer exists. Of course, it’s not just the air that poses a toxic threat in Los Angeles. Less than a day after I watched the Eaton Canyon fire set much of my community ablaze and forced the emergency evacuation of thousands of individuals, posts online circulated warning community members about immigration-related sweeps. From verified accounts of the presence of ICE in Kern County to online concern about purported immigration checks in Pasadena, in the thick of immediate displacement from the fires, panic was mixed with trepidation about where to safely meet family needs.

‘Students are scared’: Border Patrol raids fuel fear in schools

Emma Gallegos, Ed Source

Advocates have called upon school leaders to take action to protect immigrants in the wake of an extensive operation by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol in Kern County last week.

Immigrant families have been afraid to send their students to school in the wake of the extensive operation, some opting to keep them home. “Students are scared,” said Belen Carrasco, a middle school teacher at Bakersfield City School District, who reported an increase in student absences in her classroom over the last week. Students have told her that Border Patrol agents knocked on their doors, and in one case, detained a parent. Students are asking Carrasco for information on what they should do if agents approach them. One resident, Samantha Gil, said that her daughter’s immigrant friends at West High School in Bakersfield are “hidden in their houses. She is very sad for them.”

NEPC Talks Education: An Interview With Sophia Rodriguez and Jacob Kirksey About Immigration and K-12 Education Policy

Christopher Saldaña, Sophia Rodriguez, and Jacob Kirksey, NEPC

In this month’s episode of NEPC Talks Education, Christopher Saldaña discusses how changes in immigration policy affect students, families, and educational communities with Sophia Rodriguez and Jacob Kirksey. Rodriguez and Kirksey point out that although schools are legally mandated to be safe spaces for all students regardless of immigration status, schools face significant challenges to their ability to create such safe spaces. Kirksey’s research, for example, finds that immigration enforcement actions correlate directly with increased student absenteeism and decreased academic performance. His longitudinal studies found that communities affected by immigration raids experience long-term negative impacts, including lower college enrollment rates and reduced wages for affected students. 

Whole Children and Strong Communities

An Altadena school community digs out from the ashes and wonders what’s next

Gabrielle Birkner, Chalkbeat

Carlos Garcia Saldaña drove past block after block of homes, businesses, and churches “wiped off the face of the earth.” The Eaton fire that had consumed large parts of Altadena was still burning in the San Gabriel Mountains. The charter network leader needed to see what remained of his schools. As Garcia Saldaña approached Odyssey Charter School South, the facade and main entrance appeared intact. But as he looked left and up the hill, he saw a heap of twisted metal and charred rubble where, two days earlier, there had been classrooms, offices, lunch tables, play structures, and an after-school clubhouse. The tree stumps where students used to sit and eat and dream were still smoldering. “It’s just jarring and heartbreaking,” Garcia Saldaña said.

NOT a Natural Disaster [with teaching resources on climate justice]

Zinn Education Project

The climate crisis is not in some distant future. It is being felt around the world with storms, floods, heatwaves, droughts, and most dramatically with the wildfires in Southern California. Our hearts go out to the residents who face the tragic loss of lives, homes, schools, and entire communities. Addressing this crisis requires getting to the root causes. But the media continues to describe the current events out of context. Climate researcher Leah Stokes explained on Democracy Now!, Who is responsible? It’s fossil fuel companies and electric utilities, who lied about climate science for decades.

Mapping the community school policy network using Twitter data and social network analysis

Linda K. Mayger and Kathleen Provinzano, Education Policy Analysis Archives

This research sought to understand how organizations have adapted to the evolving policy ecosystem to scale and sustain a justice-orientated approach to education reform. Using descriptive social network analysis to map the policy information network that formed around Community Schools, the authors identified the influential organizations in the network and described key characteristics of its structure. They drew from Twitter data and related media articles over a five-year period to categorize the actors engaged in the Community School information network and map its geographic distribution across the United States. The findings depict a broad, multi-state network focused on promoting a proactive, positive policy agenda that differed substantially from those described in extant studies of resource networks that advance neoliberal education reforms. 

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Intergenerational care benefits children and seniors. Why is it still so rare?

Emily Tate-Sullivan, the 19th

Several times a week, teachers at Tiny Images, an early learning program in Fairmont, Nebraska, load up babies and toddlers into four- and six-seater carts and take the children on “buggy rides” through the building. They stop first to visit residents in the assisted living wing before continuing on to those in the nursing home. “Just walking down the hall and seeing kids’ faces light up — or residents’ faces light up — it makes your whole day,” says Kaci Brandt, director of Tiny Images, which is located inside Fairview Manor, a city-owned, nonprofit nursing home in the rural community of about 600.

Pro-Palestinian professor says she was forced out of Columbia University

Ana Betts, The Guardian

A tenured law professor at Columbia University who advocated for pro-Palestinian students on campus says she was in effect forced out of the university, citing a “toxic and hostile environment for legitimate debate around the war in Israel and Palestine”. Katherine Franke announced on Friday that she had reached an agreement with Columbia University that relieved her of her “obligations to teach or participate in faculty governance” after serving on the Columbia law faculty for 25 years. “While the university may call this change in my status ‘retirement’, it should be more accurately understood as a termination dressed up in more palatable terms,” she said.

Lawsuit by college professors and students challenges Alabama’s anti-DEI law

Associated Press

University professors and students in Alabama filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging a new state law that bans diversity, equity and inclusion programs at universities and put limits on how race and gender can be discussed in the college classroom. The complaint asserts the new law violates the First Amendment by placing viewpoint-based restrictions on educators’ speech and classroom lessons. Plaintiffs also argue the law is intentionally discriminatory against Black students because it targets concepts related to race and racism, limits programs that benefit Black students and eliminates campus spaces dedicated to student organizations that support Black students. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP and professors and students at the University of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The lawsuit asks a federal judge to declare the law unconstitutional and block the state from enforcing it.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Child poverty bankrupts Dr. King’s dream for economic justice

Ismael Cid-Martinez and Valerie Wilson, Economic Policy Institute

Children, poverty, and economic freedom were at the heart of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 when he spoke before more than 200,000 demonstrators at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In his remarks, Dr. King spoke about the “lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity” that curtails the civil and economic rights and agency of Black people in U.S. society. With the Lincoln Memorial as a background, Dr. King dreamed of a day when children would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. More than six decades later, child poverty continues to bankrupt the bank of justice that can help make this dream a reality.

Economic Inequality Seen as Major Challenge Around the World

Richard Wike, Moira Fagan, Christine Huang, Laura Clancy, and Jordan Lippert Pew Research

A new Pew Research Center survey of 36 nations finds widespread public concern about economic inequality. And when asked what leads to this inequality, most people across the countries surveyed point to the intersection of wealth and politics.

Funding public schools based on enrollment in the previous year may help keep their budgets more stable, research shows

Angie Nga Le and Phuong Nguyen-Hoang, The Conversation

Funding for public K-12 schools in the U.S. is based on enrollment. More students mean more money. In 31 states, public schools use the previous year’s enrollment numbers to determine the current year’s funding, which makes it easier to soften the financial blow when enrollment declines. In the rest of the states, school funding is based on the current year’s enrollment – meaning that any change in attendance is immediately felt in the budget. Some groups have criticized the prior-year funding approach – also known as the “hold harmless policy” or “funding protection” – as giving schools money for “ghost students,” calling it costly and unfair. Concerns like this may have prompted Arizona to switch funding models in 2017, giving public finance scholars like us a perfect opportunity to assess differences between how the two models can affect school budgets.

Democracy and the Public Interest

“Who you are is critical to YPAR!”: Teacher histories, identities, and Youth Participatory Action Research in K–12 schools

Miguel Casar and Eduardo Lopez, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy

Despite the growth of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) in K–12 schools and growing evidence of its positive impact on the educational and socioemotional development of youth, little is known about the educators who facilitate this work. This qualitative research project follows four educators who, alongside their students, engaged in a year-long effort to interrogate relevant social issues through YPAR. Our findings document the foundational role of teacher identities and educational histories in shaping how educators see students, conceptualize powerful learning, and navigate consequential tensions when cultivating communities of collective critical praxis in traditional K–12 schools.

On a Mission From God: Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools

Alec MacGillis, ProPublica

On a Thursday morning last May, about a hundred people gathered in the atrium of the Ohio Capitol building to join in Christian worship. The “Prayer at the Statehouse” was organized by an advocacy group called the Center for Christian Virtue, whose growing influence was symbolized by its new headquarters, directly across from the capitol. It was also manifest in the officials who came to take part in the event: three state legislators and the ambitious lieutenant governor, Jon Husted.

How Stephen Jay Gould Fought the Science Culture Wars

Myrna Perez, Jacobin

The American evolutionary biologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould’s column for Natural History magazine began as a way to balance the political convictions of his civil rights experiences with his desire to revolutionize evolutionary theory. As his career soared to new heights in later decades, his professional ambitions eventually eclipsed his leftist politics. But in the late 1970s, he was still using the column to address contemporary debates over science and politics. In the spring of 1976, he decided to weigh in on a controversy close to home with a column titled “Biological Potential vs. Biological Determinism,” which joined in the leftist criticism of the biologist Edward O. Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.

Other News of Note

The Three Evils of Society [Video]

Martin Luther King Jr., Youtube

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 speech at the National Conference on New Politics in Chicago. Here, he speaks about what he calls the Triple Evils: War, Racism and Poverty.

What Is Your Life’s Blueprint? [Video]

Martin Luther King Jr., Youtube 

Rarely seen footage of Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking to students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia on October 26, 1967.