Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

A Minneapolis Teacher Wants the Whole Country in the Streets

Dave Zirin, The Nation

Thousands of ICE thugs roam the streets, attacking schools, smashing car windows, shooting residents, and “visiting” activists in their homes. Now President Donald Trump is threatening to impose the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to flood the city with troops. Welcome to Minneapolis during the Trump regime. What is happening in Minneapolis is a fascist shit show, but there is also grassroots resistance. The oppression is all over the news, but the stories of ordinary people fighting back need to be told, too. Dan Troccoli, a public school teacher at Justice Page Middle School and union activist, says that the battle for Minneapolis is not a one-sided rout by ICE—if it was, there would not be these threats to impose martial law

What Adolescents Find Engaging and Why the Content of Instruction Does Not Come Up: A Student-Centered Just Perspective on School Engagement

Pauliina Rantavuori and Annalisa Sannin, Teachers College Record

This study presents a new student-centered just perspective on school engagement in Finland. Using cultural-historical activity theory as a conceptual framework, it explores the views of adolescent students, school staff, and school partners through semistructured interviews (n = 29) and thematic analyses asking what adolescents find engaging in school. The findings across the three interview groups show a limited emphasis on the official object of schoolwork, namely the content taught in school, compared to a much greater emphasis on peer relations. Students’ own interests related to content they engage with in their lives outside the school remain largely disconnected from the adults’ answers and from the content of instruction. 

Do as I Say: What Teachers’ Language Reveals About Classroom Management Practices

Mei Tan and Dorottya Demszky, Educational Researcher

Classroom management critically affects students’ academic and behavioral outcomes, yet we lack quantitative methods for observing these practices at scale. This study develops and validates language-based measures of classroom management—such as responding to student behavior and issuing verbal or material sanctions—using natural language processing on 1,652 elementary mathematics classroom transcripts. On average, classroom management language comprises 24% of teacher talk, and behavior management comprises 7%, with wide variation across teachers. Novice teachers use more reprimands, and command frequency increases with experience. Classrooms with more Black students experience more language reflecting exclusionary discipline. These measures offer a new lens for studying and supporting classroom management as it unfolds in real time.

Language, Culture, and Power

Looking out for ICE, California parents, teachers help students get to school

Zaidee Stavely, EdSource

A recent morning was abuzz outside the joint campus of Esperanza Elementary School and Korematsu Discovery Academy in East Oakland. A crossing guard walked parents and children across the street, cars pulled up to the curb to drop off students, and families lined up to buy tamales and champurrado, a hot drink made of corn and chocolate, sold from the trunk of a car.

Watching it all was a mom from another school, Larisa Casillas, wearing a neon green vest and a whistle around her neck. She walked up and down the block, scanning approaching vehicles, on the lookout for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents. Casillas is part of a growing number of parents, teachers and neighbors who have banded together in districts across the state, including Oakland, Los Angeles and San Diego, to watch for ICE agents outside schools, walk students to school, and bring groceries for families who are afraid to leave their homes.

Meet the Minneapolis parents patrolling their schools amid ICE operations [Audio]

Elizabeth Shockman, MPR News

Forty-seven year old Minnesota mom Elizabeth’s daily routine has changed dramatically since December. She lives in Minneapolis and late last year she started exchanging contact information with her neighbors. “When Trump announced that they were going to invade Chicago and Illinois, we knew that Minneapolis wasn’t probably far behind. At that time in the fall, we organized some signal chats just amongst parents,” said Elizabeth, who agreed to talk to MPR News, but asked us not to share her last name or the name of her kids’ school to avoid drawing the attention of federal agents to their location. On Thursday morning Elizabeth ate an egg sandwich for breakfast and her son had a bowl of Lucky Charms. Then they headed out to the icy, salty sidewalks to help their neighbors get to school.

Why Native American Curriculum Should be Taught Throughout K-12 Education

Meaghan Townsend, The 74

Annawon Weeden cuts an imposing figure, arriving at my classroom wearing a black T-shirt that says “Party Like It’s 1491,” a hat ringed with purple and white wampum, and New Balances. Students launch into their questions: “Why did you become an activist?” “Do you ever think of giving up when others don’t listen?” I’d invited Weeden, a Mashpee Wampanoag educator, to visit my high school English class in Boston. When I began teaching American Literature, I felt the course had to encompass Native American literature. I started with Tommy Orange’s novel There There. But the book is set in Oakland, California, and I wanted its message to ring closer to home.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

The Education Department is opening fewer sexual violence investigations as Trump dismantles it

Collin Brinkley, AP News

Before President Donald Trump’s administration started dismantling the Education Department, the agency served as a powerful enforcer in cases of sexual violence at schools and universities. It brought the weight of the government against schools that mishandled sexual assault complaints involving students. That work is quickly fading away. The department’s Office for Civil Rights was gutted in Trump’s mass layoffs last year, leaving half as many lawyers to investigate complaints of discrimination based on race, sex or disability in schools. Those who remain face a backlog of more than 25,000 cases. Investigations have dwindled.

Colorado schools pioneer climate jobs training program for young adults [Audio]

Rae Solomon, Colorado Public Radio

The Climate Literacy class at Boulder Valley School District’s Fairview High School had a most unusual final assignment at the end of last semester: a field trip to the thrift store. As part of the final climate action project for the year-long class, students tallied up the materials they’d need — a key part of the curriculum. They decided to “walk the walk” of sustainability and reuse second-hand things instead of buying new. “We decided we would go thrifting,” said senior Eloise Dombrowsky. On an eerily warm December morning, the entire class caught the bus out in the front of the school (nothing but public transportation for these kids) for the trip north to the Salvation Army store off of Arapahoe Avenue.

The Very Important Case of Rami and the Rainbow Bird

Marlene Jo Baquiran, Grist

The incident happened at lunchtime in the playground. Anje had seen it from the teachers’ lounge as a blur of exploding colors. The porcelain bird had shattered into hundreds of multicolored pieces; its beak severed from its face, and its wing split apart into its many fragile feathers. Some of the smaller pieces continued to jump along in the wind like tiny crickets, until finally they disappeared in the long grass entirely. Rami, six years old, was knelt down in the grass, finding splintered colors here and there, like trying to pick up glitter. He kept reaching his hands downward, now haphazardly pulling out fistfuls of grass when the grade advisor yanked him by the shoulder into a standing position. Rami stood there, looking down and away from the grade advisor, red-faced, eyes pooled with water. 

Access, Assessment, Advancement

‘Just not monetizable’: humanities programs face existential crisis at US universities

Alice Speri, The Guardian

Last month, students at Montclair State University in New Jersey held a mock funeral outside the university’s college of humanities and social sciences building. Carrying bouquets of flowers, they stood by a tombstone inscribed with the names of the school’s 15 departments, including English, history and sociology. “We are gathered here today, in front of the humble home of CHSS, Dickson Hall, to mourn the death of the social sciences and humanities at the hands of the MSU administration,” Miranda Kawiecki, a junior at the college and one of the protest’s organizers, read from a written eulogy. “I coordinated this demonstration because I have dreams that cannot be monetized. I have a problem with our society that cannot be solved with an algorithm. I have words to write and say that cannot be generated artificially.”

Humanities Endowment Awarding Millions to Western Civilization Programs

Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times

The National Endowment for the Humanities on Thursday announced $71 million in new grants, including nearly $40 million to classical humanities institutes and civic leadership programs that have been promoted by conservatives as a counterweight to liberal-dominated higher education.

The grants, awarded to 84 projects across the country, come as the Trump administration has moved to bring the agency into line with its priorities, sometimes directing money to ideological allies.

They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted.

Evan Mandery, Politico

The inaugural year of the University of Austin, or UATX as it’s known, had been marked by the frenzy and occasional chaos that one might expect from a start-up aimed at disrupting American higher education. The audacious experiment — the construction of a new university ostensibly based on principles of free expression and academic freedom — had drawn the interest and participation of a star-studded cast of public intellectuals, academics and tycoons. Even measured against this high bar, however, April 2, 2025, would be a memorable day. 

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

White Students Hurt by L.A. Desegregation Policy, Lawsuit Says

Sarah Mervosh, New York Times

A decades-old policy meant to combat the harms of school segregation in Los Angeles was challenged in federal court on Tuesday by a conservative group that says the policy discriminates against white students. The policy dates back to the 1970s, when the Los Angeles school district, the nation’s second-largest, was under a court order to desegregate and improve conditions for students of color. The policy offers smaller class sizes and other benefits to students at schools whose enrollment is predominantly Hispanic, Black or Asian — a majority of the district’s schools. The plaintiffs argue that students at schools with more white students receive “inferior treatment and calculated disadvantages,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday by the 1776 Project Foundation, a group that opposes racial preferences in education. 

Fresno Unified’s $30 million investment to support students is paying off

Lasherica Thornton, Ed Source

Lunchtime at Fort Miller Middle School in Fresno comes with a sense of urgency these days as dozens of students rush through their meals, eager to throw on jerseys and head outside to play basketball on the blacktop. Three months in, the lunch sports program, with coaching from High Performance Academy, is actively engaging teens, teaching them teamwork and “giving them something to look forward to,” Principal Eugene Reinor said. “For 30 minutes, they’re locked in and they’re playing. They’re not thinking about anything else but basketball in that moment,” he said. The school will rotate between different team sports each quarter, keeping the teens focused and out of trouble. The program has “solved a lot of problems” for 14-year-old eighth grader Thaddeus Foreman, who got into a fight earlier this year. Now he and the other student get along after playing basketball together, he said.

Trump Delivered 22% Boost to Billionaire Wealth in 2025, But Catastrophe for Working Class 

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

The first year of President Donald Trump’s second White House term made abundantly clear who he and his Republican allies in Congress serve—and who they don’t. That’s the argument of a report published Tuesday by Americans for Tax Fairness marking the one-year anniversary of the start of the second Trump administration, which has so far delivered big for the billionaire class while shafting the working class. 

Democracy and the Public Interest

Trump administration abandons anti-DEI court battle, but ‘damage has already been done’

Emma Gallegos Ed Source

The Trump administration has abandoned the legal defense of its campaign to strip federal funding from schools and colleges that promote diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The administration formally dropped its appeal Wednesday in a filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, leaving in place an August ruling from U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher in Maryland. A coalition of groups, including the American Federation of Teachers, challenged a “Dear Colleague” letter sent by the U.S. Department of Education in February, which targeted practices the administration said “toxically indoctrinated students with the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism.’”

‘My hands were really shaky’: high-school journalist documents ICE raids

Rachel Leingang, The Guardian

When immigration enforcement agents came on to her Minneapolis high school’s grounds on 7 January, Lila Dominguez was in the school’s basement working on an article about an ICE agent shooting Renee Good earlier that day. The high school junior was glued to her phone watching videos from outside the school. “I was kind of pacing around. My hands were really shaky,” she said. “I was just very overstimulated, and not really sure what to do in that moment for the people that I was with, or the people outside or my family.” Dominguez is one of the city’s tens of thousands of students living in the middle of ICE’s surge into their communities.

Why do Alabama schools need Commandments our politicians don’t follow?

John Archibald, AL.com

Three things are pretty certain in Alabama. Death. Premature and in large numbers. Taxes. With big tax breaks for corporate fat cats and the biggest burden falling on those with diddly squat.

Religion. This year, as always, so many bills in the Alabama Legislature promote religion – prayer, the Ten Commandments, chaplains in schools — that they paper right over all the other stuff that seems to poke Jesus, Moses and the founding fathers square in the eyes. Blessed are the poor? Tax ‘em so they pay a much bigger share of their income than the rich. That seems fair. And for god’s sake don’t let them eat cake. Blessed are the hypocrites, for they shall inherit the Education Policy Committee.

Other News of Note

Minnijean Brown-Trickey’s Brief But Spectacular take on walking like you belong [Video]

Amna Nawaz and Minnigean Brown-Trickey, PBS Newshour

On this Martin Luther King day, we turn for some wisdom to Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one of the original members of the Little Rock Nine, the teenagers who integrated Central High School after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Tonight, she shares her Brief But Spectacular take on her hope for the next generation.