Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

The Conflict Campaign: Exploring Local Experiences of the Campaign to Ban “Critical Race Theory” in Public K–12 Education in the U.S., 2020–2021

Mica Pollock and John Rogers with Alexander Kwako, Andrew Matschiner, Reed Kendall, Cicely Bingener, Erika Reece, Benjamin Kennedy, and Jaleel Howard, UCLA IDEA

After a summer 2020 surge of protest-fueled antiracist energy across the nation and increase in K–12 education efforts to explore issues of race and racism in U.S. society (often at students’ request), pushback against a caricatured vision of “Critical Race Theory” (“CRT”) in K–12 public schools rose over the 2020–2021 school year. Propelled by common talking points, media attention, state legislation, and school board protests, school- and district-level conflicts crescendoed over the year and into summer 2021 as critics sought to restrict or outright “ban” curriculum, lessons, professional development, and district equity and diversity efforts addressing a broad but often loosely defined set of ideas about race, racism, diversity, and inclusion.

I lead classroom conversations about race. But I need more help.

Winnie Williams-Hall, Chalkbeat

This school year, my eighth grade students took part in two very different conversations mere days apart – one focused on how the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict reinforced so much of what is broken in our country, and the other focused on justice finally being served against Ahmaud Arbery’s killers. My students wanted to talk more about the hatred that fuels violence and the role of cell phone video in decisions to acquit or convict. I did my best to facilitate meaningful dialogue in both cases, knowing the immense weight on young people in these moments and the equally great responsibility I hold as their educator.

Lawmakers are rewriting rules as schools grapple with teacher shortages 

Vanessa Romo, NPR

 

It used to be that when Cordelia Watson got an automated call to substitute teach at the Los Angeles Unified School District, there was a specific script that included the name of the teacher she’d be replacing for the day. Now, she says, there is so much turnover and so many teachers calling out sick or quarantining with COVID, that the system can’t keep up. The messages often exclude any mention of a particular teacher. “The call comes in the morning and the voice says, ‘We have an assignment for … vacancy,’” Watson told NPR. “That means the actual teacher, the one with the training, doesn’t work for the district anymore and they haven’t been replaced.”

Language, Culture, and Power

Indigenous Knowledge Is Often Overlooked in Education. But It Has A Lot to Teach Us.

Helen Thomas, EdSurge

As I sit at my grandmother’s oval-shaped wooden table, I feel a warm summer breeze through the open window. I ask her again how to pronounce iciyapi. “Ee-chee-yah-pee,” she says in a slightly slower, but confident tone. I repeat the syllables in a much slower and deliberate voice. “Ee…chee…yah..pee.” “Good my girl, that sounds good,” she says. She is teaching me how to properly introduce myself in our Lakota language, Lakȟótiyapi. I feel a deep sense of comfort knowing she has had this conversation before with dozens of young Lakota learners during her time as a Lakota language teacher in our community of Fort Yates on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

When prison education went virtual, an MIT program reached new incarcerated students

Meghan Smith, WGBH

Dominique Kirk always valued education, but she dropped out of college to prioritize caring for her kids. Years later, when she arrived at Southern Maine Women’s Reentry Center, a minimum-security facility, she had a goal in mind when she talked to Education Director Abbie Embry-Turner. “I had a lot of issues in here,” she said in a Zoom call from the facility. “When I met Abbie, I told her that I actually wanted to get my life together, and that schooling was one thing that I wanted to get back to.” Kirk restarted her college journey last year thanks to a remote learning program offered at SMWRC, a pilot from The Education Justice Institute at MIT. Now, she has plans to finish her associate’s degree in business through the University of Maine at Augusta. Both educators and correctional facility administrators say MIT’s virtual program has been a success, allowing them to reach across geographic barriers, offer classes that teach in-demand skills and reach underserved populations in New England. They hope it can be a model for prison education moving forward, well past the pandemic.

I Am a Man [OppArt]

Kirk Maynard, The Nation

Black Lives Matter.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Laurel High School Student’s Eco-Activism Has Global Reach

Rosanne Skirble, Maryland Matters

On a Friday last winter, Javier Fuentes, then a sophomore at Laurel High School in Prince George’s County, was in his bedroom attending virtual school. After classes he had a commitment. Javier was the only student invited to join a global sustainability panel among educators from Scotland, Australia, Kenya, Mexico, Germany and the United States. The online event was sponsored by the Maryland Association for Environmental and Outdoor Education, the non-profit that certifies green schools across Maryland. “I was nervous, intimidated,” he admitted, but Javier gathered his nerves and forged ahead. “I was never really involved or passionate about the environment until I was a freshman and decided to join the Green Club,” he said in his remarks to the more than 100 people registered for the event, all environmental educators or professionals in the field.

Grief Has Engulfed the Learning Environment. Here’s What Can Help

Brittany R. Collins, Education Week

As teachers and students enter the third year of the pandemic, we face unprecedented levels of grief in the learning environment. An estimated 1.5 million children worldwide lost a caregiver to COVID-19 in just the first 14 months of the pandemic—more than 120,000 of those children grieving the death of a parent or caregiving grandparent in the United States alone. That number, for comparison, equates with the entire population of Hartford, Conn. And those losses are not evenly distributed. Black and Indigenous students and other students of color face higher rates of bereavement due to systemic health inequities. Meanwhile, young people and teachers face forms of loss that extend beyond physical death.

As LA schools backtrack on COVID vaccine, dozens more districts push to mandate it

Jennah Haque, Melissa Newcomb, and Caroline Ghisolfi, CalMatters

As omicron rages throughout California, some schools have already added another layer of defense: At least 40 California districts are or soon will require vaccinations for staff or students, or both. Some of these policies are stricter than Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plans to require vaccination for all K-12 staff and students before the next school year, according to a CalMatters investigation. While large districts like San Diego Unified and Los Angeles Unified have garnered national attention for their independent mandates, several dozen have gone largely unnoticed by state and national media. Neither the California Department of Education nor any other agency is keeping track of all individual district policies. CalMatters contacted all 940 public school districts to create the first living database recording the state patchwork of COVID-19 vaccination requirements for schools.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

California unveils ‘College Corps’ program to help students pay for education through community service [VIDEO]

Tracy Bloom, KTLA 5

Gov. Gavin Newson on Tuesday announced a new program that will help students at 45 colleges and universities in the state pay for their education in exchange for performing hundreds of hours of volunteer work. The “Californians for All” College Corps aims to “help create debt-free college pathways for low-income students who commit to serve,” according to a news release from the governor’s office. Under the program, select students who complete 450 hours of community service during the academic year will receive up to $10,000, according to a news release from the governor’s office. The hours must be completed in areas including K-12 education, COVID-19 recovery and climate action.

Blind students fight for accessible college classes[AUDIO]

Education Beat Podcast

In 2017, two blind students in the Los Angeles Community College District filed a lawsuit claiming that they and other blind students weren’t given accessible materials in math classes. The students say that without materials in braille or audio, or tutors to read the material out loud, the classes are almost impossible to pass, effectively barring students from transferring to a four-year college.  California’s largest community college district is planning to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that federal disability rights laws don’t cover “unintentional discrimination.” What impact could this court case have on the rights of students with disabilities?

Colleges lost 465,000 students this fall. The continued erosion of enrollment is raising alarm.

Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, Washington Post

Student enrollment at colleges fell once again in the fall, a report has found, prompting some to worry whether the declines experienced during the pandemic could become an enduring trend. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center on Thursday said undergraduate enrollment in fall 2021 dropped 3.1 percent, or by 465,300 students, compared with a year earlier. The drop is similar to that of the previous fall and contributes to a 6.6 percent decline in undergraduate enrollment since 2019.  That means more than 1 million students have gone missing from higher education in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Clearinghouse.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Wisconsin’s Rural Schools in “Crisis Mode”

Steven Potter, In These Times

No matter who you ask, whether it’s education association officials, university professors, researchers or the teachers themselves, they’ll all tell you the same thing:

The number one problem facing Wisconsin’s rural school districts is finding — and keeping — enough teachers to teach in those districts.  “The teacher shortage is an issue all across the country,” says Kim Kaukl, who worked for more than 30 years as a school administrator before becoming the executive director of the Wisconsin Rural Schools Alliance (WIRSA). ​“But it’s really exasperated out in the rural areas because of the location of many of our rural districts, especially when you’re trying to attract young people to come out to more remote areas.”

Northeast Nigeria’s students brave kidnappings, poverty, to go to school

Sally Hayden, Irish Times

Head teacher Sani Garba Mohammed stands in front of a blackboard reading “R data processing” in the El Ansar Islamiya school in Maiduguri, northeast Nigeria. These are notes from a computer class, he explains, even though his school of more than 400 students has no computers. “We learn theory,” Mohammed laughs. He has bigger problems to deal with. The school charges fees of 4,000 naira (€8.46) a term but he estimates that only 30 per cent of students pay it. Teachers in Nigeria get “respect but no money” and purchasing basic supplies for the school is a struggle, he says.

Natural disasters can increase academic inequalities: report

Zach Budryk, The Hill

Natural disasters are associated with an increase in racial and income-based academic disparities in affected school districts, according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). GAO officials spoke to officials with five vulnerable school districts on challenges associated with the aftermaths of national disasters from 2017-2019. School districts that are recipients of federal disaster grants have disproportionate numbers of students with social vulnerabilities, such as disabled, low-income or minority students, according to researchers. They found obstacles to recovery generally fell into one of four categories: academic, emotional, financial and physical. Investigators also found frequent lack of resources to address these challenges, noting that in two rural districts, officials said there were not enough available mental health providers to address the emotional traumas.

Democracy and the Public Interest

They fought critical race theory. Now they’re focusing on ‘curriculum transparency.’

Tyler Kingkade, NBC News

As state legislatures kick into gear this month, Republican governors and lawmakers who have fought to limit discussions of race in public schools are lining up to support a new aim: curriculum transparency. Lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation to require schools to post lists of all of their teaching materials online, including books, articles and videos. The governors of Arizona, Florida and Iowa, who have previously raised concerns about how teachers discuss racism’s impact on politics and society, called for curriculum transparency laws in speeches to their legislatures this month.

The Topics That Lead Book Ban Requests, According to School Leaders

Madeline Will, Education Week

Over the past year, some parents and activists have attempted to ban books about race, gender, and sexuality from classrooms and school libraries, sparking national headlines and controversies. A new, nationally representative survey of educators sheds some light on how common these book censorship requests are—and which subjects are most frequently challenged. The EdWeek Research Center surveyed 1,200 teachers, principals, and district leaders in the second half of December.

I am a social studies teacher. My students and I are watching democracy erode in real-time.

John Gudza, Chalkbeat

As a high school history teacher, I engage with my students about the importance of democracy. The values of participation, representation, taking part in public discourse, and challenging authoritarianism in all its forms are ideas that we connect to our lessons daily. We’ve discussed, for example, the labor movement of the late 19th century and the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.Those conversations have felt particularly resonant lately. Last week, we marked the  one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot, and our suburban New Orleans school district elevated a man who marched to the Capitol that day — someone who has written that teachers have “no values” and “no work ethic” — to its board.

Other News of Note

King was a critical race theorist before there was a name for it

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Los Angeles Times

For the first time, we’re observing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday under new laws in multiple states that ban the instruction of “divisive” interpretations of our racial past. The assaults have given new weapons to an enduring faction in American society that has long resisted the reckoning that his life’s work demanded. In King’s day, this faction was known as the “Massive Resistance,” an effort to organize and frustrate the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling and efforts to build multiracial classrooms. Today, this faction is known as the “anti-CRT” effort, which seeks to proscribe race-related curricula, books or trainings that offer a discomforting view of our past and its current implications.