Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Linda McMahon Has No Education Experience Except Wanting to Defund Public Schools

Jessica Washington, The Intercept

As Washington prepares for President-elect Donald Trump’s second inauguration, federal agencies are bracing for a wave of anticipated cuts — perhaps none more so than the Department of Education. Trump promised the total destruction of the long-standing federal agency in a September 2023 campaign video, with an announcement that he would be “sending all education and education work and needs back to the states.” Since the brash pronouncement, the former president has refused to offer calcifications about whether he still plans to shutter the department and how he plans to get Congress to buy in. He has, however, named someone to shepherd his vision for the agency: Linda McMahon. For those with only a glancing familiarity with McMahon, Trump’s decision to appoint her to run the Department of Education could appear baffling. She is best known for her career as a professional wrestler and as co-founder of the World Wrestling Entertainment corporation, the billion-dollar company known as the WWE.

How Labor Can Fight Trump’s Authoritarianism

Alex Caputo-Pearl, Jacobin

On January 19, 2017, tens of thousands of UTLA members, students, parents, and allies at hundreds of schools across the region protested the inauguration of Donald Trump. They carried signs in the shape of shields that would become iconic across Los Angeles — among them “Shield Against Racism and Sexism,” “Shield Against Homophobia and Transphobia,” “Shield Against Islamophobia and Antisemitism,” “Shield Against Immigrant Detention and Deportation,” and “Shield Against Union-Busting.” The action was part of national protests coordinated by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS), a labor/community coalition including the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union, Journey for Justice, Center for Popular Democracy, Alliance for Educational Justice, and more.

Migrants, refugees, victims of war have a right to education, pope says

Cindy Wooden, OSV News

Pope Francis has asked Catholics around the world to pray with him in January that migrants, refugees and victims of war will have a chance for an education. “Let us pray for migrants, refugees and those affected by war, that their right to an education, which is necessary to build a better world, might always be respected,” was the prayer intention he chose for the start of the New Year. The Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, formerly called the Apostleship of Prayer, is a Jesuit-run outreach that has given Catholics the pope’s monthly prayer intentions since 1890. Pope Francis records a short video reflection on each month’s prayer, and his first video for 2025 was released Jan. 2. Due to war, migration or poverty, he said, “some 250 million boys and girls lack education,” and yet “all children and youth have the right to go to school, regardless of their immigration status.” Respecting that right is good for migrants and good for society, the pope said.

Language, Culture, and Power

Florida students are giving up Saturdays to learn Black history lessons their schools don’t teach

Kate Payne, AP News

Buried among Florida’s manicured golf courses and sprawling suburbs are the artifacts of its slave-holding past: the long-lost cemeteries of enslaved people, the statues of Confederate soldiers that still stand watch over town squares, the old plantations turned into modern subdivisions that bear the same name. But many students aren’t learning that kind of Black history in Florida classrooms. In an old wooden bungalow in Delray Beach, Charlene Farrington and her staff gather groups of teenagers on Saturday mornings to teach them lessons she worries that public schools won’t provide. They talk about South Florida’s Caribbean roots, the state’s dark history of lynchings, how segregation still shapes the landscape and how grassroots activists mobilized the Civil Rights Movement to upend generations of oppression.

Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results

Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, New York Times

In a polarized nation, one point of agreement deserves more attention: Young adults say they feel woefully unprepared for life in the workforce, and employers say they’re right. In a survey by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation of more than 4,000 members of Gen Z, 49 percent of respondents said they did not feel prepared for the future. Employers complain that young hires lack initiative, communication skills, problem-solving abilities and resilience. There’s a reason the system isn’t serving people well, and it goes beyond the usual culprits of social media and Covid. Many recent graduates aren’t able to set targets, take initiative, figure things out and deal with setbacks — because in school and at home they were too rarely afforded any agency.

Survey: Growing number of U.S. adults lack literacy skills

Joe Murphy, NBC News

The share of adults with literacy skills at the lowest measured levels increased substantially as the gap between the high-skilled and low-skilled in the U.S. expands, according to new data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ latest survey of adult skills. The survey was previously administered in 2017, when 19% of U.S. adults ranked at the lowest levels of literacy. In 2023, that figure increased to 28%, a change that NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr called “substantial” in a news conference announcing the survey Monday. “It is larger than what we would normally see in an international assessment, particularly literacy, which is a fairly stable construct,” she said.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Teaching about the climate crisis: Jubilant protests, restorative justice and role play

Caroline Preston and Nick Fuller Googins, Hechinger Report

Hi, everyone. This week I’m sharing a conversation with Nick Fuller Googins, who teaches fourth grade in Saco, Maine. He’s also the author of “The Great Transition,” a novel about a future in which people have come together to cut emissions to net zero and halt planetary collapse. The book focuses on a family that’s been relocated to Nuuk, Greenland. The mother, Kristina, and father, Larch, hold different views on retribution for former oil executives and other “climate criminals,” a tension that appears in the school assignments of their teenage daughter, Emi. Googins had a lot to share on teaching about climate change, restorative justice, collective action and more. Hope you enjoy it! Wishing you a restful holiday and I look forward to connecting in the new year.

Intersectionality in youth climate activism as educational practice: political, pragmatic, and pedagogical dimensions

Ana Garcia, Dora Rebelo, Juliana Digenes-Lima, Maria Fernandes-Jesus, Carla Malafaia, Frontiers in Education

Youth climate movements have increasingly adopted an intersectional approach to activism, highlighting how diverse social categories (inter alia, race, gender, social class, sexuality) intersect with power structures and systems of oppression. This article explores the educational value of practices of intersectionality as they unfold in activists’ everyday lives, both within the climate movement and in its relationship with other movements. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic data from young climate activists belonging to the School Strike for Climate chapters in Portugal’s two largest cities (Porto and Lisbon), we account for both private and public activist events—such as activists’ meetings, school occupations, and protest actions—and the connections with other activist causes, including feminist, anti-fascist, pro-housing, and LGBTQI+ rights. We show that intersectionality in youth collective action translates into: (i) a political commitment to anchor the climate struggle in systemic injustices that affect minoritized groups and non-normative identities, and (ii) a pragmatic strategy to uphold the public relevance and reach of youth climate mobilization.

The Case for Making Overdose Reversal Medication Accessible to Students

Suhanee Mitragotri

Since 1999, drug overdoses have killed more than a million people in the United States. Opioids are responsible for 72 percent of those deaths. In 2023 alone, more than 80,000 people in the United States died due to an opioid overdose. These overall numbers are alarming for our nation, but the tragic loss of children and adolescents to opioids in particular receives far less attention than it deserves. The United States lost, on average, twenty-two adolescent lives to an overdose every day in 2022. U.S. efforts to reduce drug usage among adolescents date back to the early 1980s, when the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) and “Just Say No” campaigns rose to teach students about substance abuse and tell them to refuse drugs if offered. The campaigns’ premises were simple, but ultimately ineffective. Students continued to turn to drugs for a variety of reasons, including peer pressure, trauma or conflict at home, and stress from school and classmates.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Norway, IQ tests and child care deregulation: Our favorite early ed stories this year

5 early childhood stories we couldn’t stop thinking about in 2024

Jackie Mader, Hechinger Report

Happy holidays, and to those of you who are celebrating today, Merry Christmas! I am so grateful for your readership this year. Reporting on early childhood is an immense privilege, and I appreciate the conversations and story ideas you send my way, as well as the many early educators, experts and parents who have welcomed me into their classrooms and lives. As 2024 winds down, I wanted to share some of the stories that have resonated most with me this year

Civil Discourse in a Time of Genocide

Michael Schwalbe, Common Dreams

Civil discourse is preferable to the alternatives of coerced silence and violence. Coerced silence means that one side has exercised power to end conversation—to say, in effect, there is no point in further discussion; be quiet and accept that our desires will prevail. Violence means that reason has failed and we are reduced to the condition of resolving disputes by means of fang and claw, rock and club, bullet and bomb. Despite the dismal historical record of our species, as a professor I have held out hope that humans are capable of doing better. Ordinarily this would imply support for any effort, in universities or elsewhere, to promote civil discourse. But the efforts we see now—the selling of civil discourse as the solution to problems of polarization and rancor on our campuses and in society more generally—are a problem, because their main effect is to block change.

Research shows that DACA benefits both Dreamers and their US-born peers

Briana Ballis, Brookings

In 2012, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) provided legal protection and work authorization for over 650,000 undocumented youth living in the U.S. who were enrolled in school or had completed high school. As one of the most significant immigration reforms in recent years, DACA remains central to immigration policy debates, particularly amid fluctuating administrative actions attempting to cancel or reinstate the program. With immigration front and center in this year’s election, it’s important to know what research tells us about the effects of policies such as DACA. In fact, we now have considerable—and growing—evidence on DACA, and that evidence tells a largely positive story.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

A Restaurant Is More Than a Workplace for People Often Shunned by Employers

Daniel Politi, New York Times

Nacho Fernández Suárez winces when he recalls the eight years he spent as an administrative assistant doing odd errands in Argentina’s Congress. He was part of an inclusion program for people with disabilities. “They bullied me, they pushed me, they treated me poorly,” said Mr. Fernández Suárez, 34, who has an intellectual disability. He was also bored, he added, barely given any work to do. Boredom is not much of a problem these days for Mr. Fernández Suárez, who is part of the staff at a popular restaurant in Buenos Aires that is believed to be the first eating establishment in Argentina largely operated by neurodivergent individuals. The restaurant, Alamesa, is seeking to change the paradigm of what inclusion in the workplace means for people who often do not have a clear path to employment after their formal schooling ends.

A 1975 law helped kids with disabilities access education. Schools now need more help [Audio]

Cory Turner, All Things Considered, NPR

For a long time, children with disabilities had pretty dismal prospects when it came to schooling. Many were simply forced to stay home. Next year marks the 50th anniversary of a landmark federal law that helped change that by guaranteeing all children with disabilities the right to a free public education. But today, the costs of special education have led to a crisis for many schools. NPR’s Cory Turner has been digging into the archives and has this look back at how we got here.

How the LA Tenants Union Fights Displacement with Community

Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, In These Times

The first LA Tenants Union meeting was a ​“renter’s rights workshop.” Soon, we realized, all three parts of that framework had to go. “Renter,” because we had to broaden our understanding of the populations who live in antagonism to rent, including people who live outside. ​“Workshop,” because we couldn’t just offer resources to individual tenants and send them on their way. ​“Rights,” because what few tenants had weren’t easy to use and didn’t stop landlords from acting otherwise. And the right we want to win, the human right to housing, will take another kind of housing system, another kind of state, and another kind of world. The tenants union is the vehicle to move toward that world now. If tenants want to change our material conditions we have to change the power relations that keep those conditions in place. We need power ourselves.

Democracy and the Public Interest

How vouchers harm public schools

Hilary Wething, Economic Policy Institute

Voucher programs for schools are rapidly expanding across the country. Under these programs, public budgets provide funding to parents to either send their children to private school or homeschool them. These programs’ growing popularity raises the question of whether letting public money leave the public school system and subsidize private forms of schooling is a way to improve children’s access to an excellent education. EPI’s analysis shows that vouchers harm public schools. To illustrate the damage, EPI has developed a tool that estimates fiscal externalities—the dollar costs to school districts from students leaving public schools with a voucher. An externality produces an outcome for those who aren’t responsible for the decision at hand. In this case, the fiscal externality is the negative effect that voucher programs will have on public school systems: Voucher programs redirect money away from traditional public schools.

School vouchers remain a GOP priority even as voters reject them

April Rubin, Axios

School voucher programs championed by President-elect Trump have faced stiff headwinds from voters but remain a priority for the incoming Republican-led Congress and the White House. Why it matters: Republican supporters often cite “universal school choice” when backing these measures. Opponents of vouchers say they deepen inequality and siphon public schools’ already scant resources. How it works: School voucher programs enable families to use public funds to pay for private and charter schools and sometimes homeschooling. The big picture: The incoming Republican-led Congress and White House could codify school voucher programs into law.

Arizona Regulators Closed a Failing Charter School. It Reopened as a Private Religious School Funded by Taxpayers.

Eli Hager, ProPublica

One afternoon in September, parents started arriving for pickup at Title of Liberty Academy, a private Mormon K-8 school in Mesa, Arizona, on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix. Individually, the moms and dads were called in to speak to the principal. That’s when they were told that the school, still just a few months old, was closing due to financial problems. There would be no more school at Title of Liberty. Over the course of that week, more parents were given the news, as well as their options for the remainder of the school year: They could transfer their children to another private or charter school, or they could put them in a microschool that the principal said she’d soon be setting up in her living room. Or there was always homeschooling. Or even public school.

Other News of Note

Mum Does The Washing [Video]

Joshua Idehen, Youtube

The world
according to your mum doing the washing
Capitalism:
your mum does the washing.
You pay her a dollar.
You get her to do your mates washing.
Your mate pays you 50 dollars
Communism:
your mum does the washing.
You do the washing.
Every night you salute a photo of your dad.